Social/Behavioral Sciences Research Guide: Introduction

This InfoGuide will help you start your research project for any of your social/behavioral sciences courses. Drs Rain Bosworth, NTID professor, and Joan Naturale, NTID Librarian, created the development and organization of this InfoGuide. Much of the content is from Scribbr, which is linked below. A resource you might find helpful is LinkedIn Learning (linked below) which has captioned videos on these topics. 

Because you need to finish this study in one semester, a survey or observation study is recommended.

We will cover the following:

1. understanding and defining empirical research and  different types of research methodologies, such as qualitative, quantitative, and mixed studies

2.  finding a topic, using a variety of resources, which may be refined as you do your literature search

3. identifying a research problem, formulating a problem statement and developing a research question

4.  identifying keywords from your research questions and create a search statement using Boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR)

5.  analyzing the parts of a peer-reviewed article

6.   identifying databases for your discipline, such as PsycInfo/PsychArt

7.  selecting empirical articles in our databases using limiters and search tips,

8  creating an annotated bibliography, using BibGuru, Mendeley, or Zotero citation generator or management tools

9. synthesizing articles by comparing and contrasting studies, identifying gaps in the literature, recurring and/or contradictory results or themes, 

10. writing up the research proposal with your refined topic, research question and hypothesis, methods, predictions, and results (if not actual, then projected).

11. Create a poster and infographic of your proposal.