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:
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:
I can combine these different resources to talk about how hospital works are affect by subcontract work because subcontract work positions make the workers more likely to feel instability and 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.)