PSC 492: Home

Hello! I am Heather, the Social Sciences librarian. I have created this guide to support the PSC 492 class. Together, we will look at the research process:

1. How to search for resources
2. How to evaluate the resources you found
3. How to keep track of your work and your resources (through citation management)

If you have any further questions, please email me at hmbutler@southalabama.edu. Include your class code and professor's name.

When we research, what are we doing? What are we looking for?

Our goal is to find information to answer our research question. Usually, each resource (article, book chapter, dataset) can answer part of your research question.

We will need to combine information from different resources to fully answer your question.

Example research question:

How does subcontract work affect hospital employees?

I use this research question to find resources. Through doing several searches, I find these resources:

1. An article about how subcontract workers feel like they have job instability.
2. An article about how job instability makes workers more likely to have depression.
3. An article about how hospital employees who have depression have lower work productivity.

I can combine these different resources to talk about how hospital workers are affected by subcontract work because subcontract work positions make the workers more likely to feel instability, and the workers might then have higher rates of depression. I can also talk about how this might lower the work productivity.

(In a real research project, I should have more than three articles backing my claims.)