PUBH 5315: Theoretical Foundations of Health Behavior and Public Health

When searching your topic, you should break apart your issue into each major concept.

For example, if I am interested in potential loneliness issues older people face, and whether digital interventions are helpful in mitigating those issues, my keywords are: loneliness, digital intervention, and older adults.  These topics become the basis for my keywords to search in the databases. However, these three terms should not be my only keywords, because not all articles will use the same terms to describe these concepts. 

For each area, it is important to brainstorm synonyms (and sometimes antonyms). This is because there are many ways that an article might describe the same concept. For “loneliness,"  some other keywords might be depression, social isolation, suicidal thoughts etc. 

Finally, it is important that your articles mention theory for this assignment. Brainstorm a few of the theories and their component parts that you expect to find, or that you have already found during your test searches. Write these down to add into your search. 

You can download the concept mapping document below to help organize your search terms, or you can use the concept mapping tool from the University of Arizona, which is an excellent resource that will guide you through the process. 

Many faculty and students use Google Scholar for their research. Be sure to sign-in with you Baylor University ID before you search so that you have full access to the numerous resources available to you through Baylor Libraries. You can do this by navigating to the setting menu and selecting "library links," then entering Baylor University. 

While Google Scholar is a great resource to use because it is not hidden behind a paywall, it is important to know both the pros and cons of the resources you are using to find information. 

Pros:

• Free
• Simple design
• Wide variety of materials available including grey literature and conference proceedings
• "Related article" feature 

Cons:

• advanced search options are limited
• filter options are limited (large search results are hard to avoid)
• material available is not comprehensive
• full-text items are often unavailable free of charge

You can navigate to the "Advanced Search" area of Google Scholar to enter your key concepts. It is important to note that Google Scholar is not a database, it is an advanced search engine. Compared to many databases,  the advanced search options on Google Scholar are limited and may not filter results in the most efficient way possible. For example, the search pictured below retrieved almost 700,000 results, many of which had nothing to do with my topic of interest. That being said, the results that were relevant were great starting points for me, and helped me to locate other relevant sources by consulting their citation sections and by using the "related article" feature.

Once your keywords (including synonyms/antonyms) are selected, you can move on to searching in the databases. A database is a platform or technology that hosts content from journals, newspapers, archives etc. To identify potential databases, travel to the Baylor Libraries databases page at https://libguides.baylor.edu/az.php and use the subjects pull down menu to see databases listed by particular field.

Ebsco can be a particularly useful platform to use since it allows you to search several databases at one time. In the databases list I can click on Academic Search Complete https://libguides.baylor.edu/az.php?a=a and be taken to the Ebsco platform. At the top you can click on “choose databases”. You will then see a list of all the databases the library subscribes to from Ebsco.  Some of the best databases for public health topics include: Medline, CINAHL, and APA PsycINFO. You should see all of those in this list, and you can select all of them at once for your search. 

As you are looking for articles that are about your topic that employ a particular theory, you can add in the theory as another concept for your search. However, it is important to note that researchers will sometimes not use the name of a theory in the title or abstract of their paper, but they will utilize the theory's constructs. For this reason, it is important to include the components of your theory in your search. For example, if we were searching on the Theory of Planned Behavior our search might look like this: 

It is helpful to search for a main concept in conjunction with a search for theoretical frameworks and concepts. 

You can do this by combining a Boolean operator concept search with something called a proximity search, which is a way for a database to find terms that are very near one another, but not side by side. 

A search for theoretical frameworks in Academic Search Complete or Proquest Dissertations and Theses might look like: 

(theoretical OR theory) NEAR/5 (framework OR model) 

remember to combine this search with a central concept from your paper in order to find theoretical frameworks that correspond to your research topic.