Listed in: Psychology, as PSYC-364
Moodle site: Course (Login required)
Julia D. McQuade (Section 01)
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:
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:
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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:
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:
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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:
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:
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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:
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.