Brainstorm keywords for your search, for example if you are looking for:
children who have witnessed domestic violence
You don’t need to include the joining words, so you might start off with the search keywords:
children witness domestic violence
This will automatically search for all of these words. All of these words should appear somewhere in the record or full text of the search results.
Quotation marks will search for an exact phrase, use it around words that you want to appear together in that exact order:
children witness “domestic violence”
"Phrase searching" can be very useful to narrow down your search results but be aware that you will not find spelling variations or different ordering of those words (e.g. violence in a domestic setting).
As you search, look out for other useful keywords in your search results. The literature doesn’t always use the same language as practitioners, and there may be regional variations in spelling and language. Domestic violence has a number of synonyms or narrower terms that may uncover relevant results, for example: family violence, domestic abuse, intimate partner violence. If you use brackets and an upper case OR in between synonyms you can search all variations in a single search:
children witness (“domestic violence” OR “family violence” OR “domestic abuse” OR “intimate partner violence”)
You can use an asterisk * symbol to search for variations on the ending of a word (truncation):
child* witness* (“domestic violence” OR “family violence” OR “domestic abuse” OR “intimate partner violence”)
Will search for child, children, childhood AND witness, witnesses, witnessed AND any of the phrases in brackets.
For more help see the Library webpage Research Skills
Chapter Two "Finding the evidence for practice in social work" in Evidence Discovery and Assessment in Social Work Practice. 2015 by Editors: M. Pack & J. Cargill.
is a mini tutorial outlining the principles for finding information for practice in social work, locations to search, and criteria for evaluating evidence.
It is also in Week 6 of the Reading List for SOCWK405
Sage Research Methods supports every step of a research project, covering qualitative and quantitative methods, including interactive tools such as Methods Map and Project Planner. With hundreds of research methods ebooks, reference, video, case studies, and journal content.