Sociology: Social Research Methods

For Sociology and Criminology library research, we look at people (identity, psychology, culture, etc.), their environment, community (and communities they interact with), society as a whole, law, policy, rights, etc. -and it can get overwhelming quickly.  This guide accompanies a class session, but reach out with your research questions for a quick response from your librarian: dale.larsen@utah.edu

Not quite scholarly -but really great for keywords!
CQ Researcher (What is important to U.S. voters right now: Brief)
CQ Magazine (What is important to U.S. voters right now: Long Form)
Roper iPoll
Nexis Uni (news, law, business, people)
US Newsstream (newspapers all across the U.S. -lots of local info, opinion, policy commentary)
Pew Research Center (free open web)
 

google contextual searching: find keywords and ideas from the web: (mix and match your own keywords for open-web ideas)
income inequality:immigration
gender equity:e-sports
environmental activism:salt lake city
transgender:healthcare
 

Discipline-Specific Research: Lots of scholarship (note: some non-academic sources appear, too)
Sociological Abstracts
Social Science Premium Collection
PsycINFO (psychology, but with many applications in social sciences)
Education Full Text & ERIC (education, family development)
Business Source Premier (business)
PAIS (public policy and analysis)
Worldwide Political Science Abstracts (politics)
CINAHL (nursing -medical policy, procedure, intervention)

MEDLINE (great for medicine, micro & macro)
PubMED (advanced, ask for help!)

​Library Catalog (everything -highly recommended)


High Level Systematic Search Tools sort search results by "highest cited"
Scopus
Web of Science

Need some keyword help? How to find more on Income Inequality (as an example):
Here's a search that worked for me
   "income inequality"
   AND
   political OR economic OR policy OR government
   AND
   poverty OR homeless OR underemployed OR unemployed
(how can I edit this search? -and other searches?)

price OR cost OR inflation OR value
Insulin OR diabetic OR "blood sugar"
"social movement" OR campaign OR "grass roots"
"economic mobility" OR "social mobility" OR "educational attainment"
also...
identity OR group OR culture OR community
economics OR ?
healthcare OR medicine OR "health insurance"
generations OR gen-z OR millenial OR "baby boomer"
sports OR football OR baseball
gender OR female OR "title 9" OR "gender equity"

Learning Objectives

At the end of the library class, students should be able to:

-comfortably be able to find a scholarly article in the online library
-understand a complex advanced search in a scholarly database
-understand annotated bibliography creation strategies

-know how to reach out for more help from the library

Dale's starter kit for engaging with complicated literature:

First Stop: Library Research:
As you find articles that you think are relevant, 
   download the article (get that full text and save it)
   get a small amount of citation information (title, journal, etc.)
   read the first page or so and write a sentence about what the article is saying
   find a quote that agrees with the sentence you wrote

Second Stop: Synthesis
After you have a list of articles, try to put them into a cohesive order where each article contributes to a greater narrative or point.  This can be helped greatly by a chaotic mind map where you try to tie concepts to each other into a greater whole

(Dale's sample is not the only way to do it, but it is one way that works for me :-)

The Institutional Review Board has a critical role in reducing risk for the reputation of the college, university -and also, especially, for the research subjects.  Instead of being burdensome, it can offer an excellent third party critical review to your research to ensure it is free from bias or other significant problems.  The University of Utah IRB page (some links below) wants you to succeed and offers training and help as well as forms and tools for getting it right.

UofU Human Research Training (including CITI info)

New Investigator Toolkit (handy!)

The CHOP Boilerplate -what's IRB?