Library Psychology 364

As your final project, you will be designing a research proposal that extends understanding of risk factors for a particular disorder. 

This involves several components:

• introduction
• methods
• hypothesized results
• discussion

Your course assignments are structured to help you through this process, starting with a literature review. This will inform not only your introduction, but also your methods, hypothesized results, and discussion section. 

The first step requires generating compelling research questions, informed by the current state of understanding in the field. This is a recursive process:

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Some ways to start generating questions are:

1. Think about the disorders you have covered in your course. Which one interests you the most? Why?
2. Take 3 minutes and free-write, writing down every question you have related to this disorder.
3. Look over your questions. Which seem especially important? Why?
4. Start with your 3 most important questions, and start searching the literature. Has anyone else addressed these questions? In what ways? What further questions do they raise?

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 See the next sections for tips on searching the literature and conducting your literature review!

These articles report original research or studies, i.e. actual observations or experiments, rather than theoretical developments or methodological approaches. You can identify them in several ways:

• keywords: look for “study,” “empirical,” or mentions of participants, observations, methodology, or measurements
• structure: will usually include introduction, methods, results, and discussion sections
• publication: should be in an academic or professional journal, such as Journal of Psychology or JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, instead of popular magazines or newspapers

The following databases consist of scholarly and professional titles that publish empirical research articles:

PyscINFO: 1887 to present, covers academic literature in psychology and related disciplines, including psychiatry, sociology, education, and other areas.

Search tip: On the Advanced Search page, you can scroll down to Methodology and select EMPIRICAL STUDY to narrow your search.

Search tip: You can add keywords to your search that are included in empirical studies, and can limit to scholarly journals.

Search tip: You can also narrow your search by using Subject Terms. Articles are tagged with these terms to indicate their primary subjects. To search by Subject Terms, you can click on the links listed in article records.

Or you can use the Thesaurus to look up Subject Terms and add them to your search. PsycINFO will also suggest Subject Terms if you toggle that option before searching.

PsycINFO:

PubMed: 1966 to present, comprehensive biomedical index that includes psychology and related disciplines

In PubMed, subject terms are called Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), and you can search for them similiarly in an index.

 
Web of Science: 1984 to present, includes thousands of journals across the sciences and social sciences, and provides a cited reference search function.

Literature reviews are not just article summaries.

They are a comprehensive, focused, critical and coherent synthesis of the key findings and understandings in the field.

This requires a dual perspective, both seeing the "key findings" within each study and seeing how findings relate to the "bigger picture" of the topic overall.

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As you review studies, jot notes about:

• What are the key findings?
• How do these findings relate to each other? Do they build on each other? Are there contradictions?
• How could these findings fit into an overall "story" for the reader?
• What implications do the findings have for the "big picture"?

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Another purpose of a literature review is to contextualize your research -- identifying gaps and further directions that inform your work.

Getting started, you can focus on the discussion sections in articles. See where they identify further questions or gaps.

You can also ask yourself:

• why are findings important?
• what are the implications for treatment, prevention, better understanding?
• what are the major limitations of this research?
• what are the next steps in this line of research? What unanswered questions still remain?
• are there other variables that might influence these effects (e.g., moderators) that have not been explored?

As you get a sense of the nature and scope of your research, you'll need to start thinking about methods. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Who will you be conducting this study with? What are the characteristics of participants?
• What is your hypothesis? What do you expect to happen? Where is this expectation supported in the literature?
• What are your independent and dependent variables?
• How are you operationally defining them, i.e., measuring them?

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Next, you'll need to present your hypothesized results. You'll want to re-state your hypothesis, independent, and dependent variables. Then, describe what you would find, assuming that your hypothesis is supported.

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In the discussion section, you'll summarize and reflect upon your results and their wider implications:

• why are these findings important? how might they inform prevention or treatment?
• what are the limitations of your study?
• what future related research is needed to better understand this disorder?

Research consultations can help you in multiple ways, in defining your research question, searching the literature, evaluating and organizing your sources, and more. If you don't know who to ask, you can start with us!

You can visit the Reference Desk in Frost, or make an appointment to talk to a librarian, or email me directly: kdagan@amherst.edu.