11 Module 4- Introduction to Resource Navigation and Research
11 Module 4- Introduction to Resource Navigation and Research
Learning Objectives
By the end of this module you should be able to…
- Understand a general research process
- Navigate Google Scholar
- Navigate UN Databases
As a first step to finding answers to the larger and more complicated questions, we must break them down into smaller questions. Consider the question from last session: “ How might we help reduce litter due to negligent bus riders on King Street West and Macklin Street North, Hamilton?” In order to tackle this questions we should try asking smaller scale questions such as “ has the City of Hamilton attempted to reduce littering in this area previously, and if so, what did they try?”
Once you have created your list of questions, use this strategy to start working your way through your questions:
- Start with reviewing any materials provided to you by our organization when you first learned about the topic. In this case, you would want to review our Challenge Guide (a link to an example challenge guide can be found in the “Problem Scoping Best-Practice Guide”).
- If you can’t find the answer there, go to Google Scholar or any other academic journal you feel comfortable using.
- If you can’t find the answer on Google Scholar, review the UN databases for information.
- Finally, if you really can’t find anything related to your question, short-list the question as a potential candidate to pose to your subject-matter experts. By the end of this work-period, you will be able to submit some questions to the stakeholders.
Lets take a closer look at the steps that we have listed above. Let’s pretend that looking at the challenge guides has given us some useful information such as the fact that the Macklin by King Street bus stop is in Ward one. We also learned that the residents in the area are disgruntled because two local coffee shops in the area produce large amounts of plastic. Finally, we learned that Kind Street is a high traffic area.
Note! Research is an iterative process. Feel free to update your questions as information becomes available. For example – Maybe you started by thinking the target population was middle aged, to discover it primarily concerning adolescents; that’s fine! Update as you go.
Here is an example of how you might update an existing question. For this challenge question, litter is huge and can refer to all manner of materials. Specifying single-use plastic in this ward can further scope the question and make it easier to tackle.
So, even after looking through the challenge guide, we couldn’t find the information we wanted, so let’s move to google scholar.
Google scholar is a search engine that contains scholarly material which spans across all disciplines. It is a reliable source for seeking academic information and is open to the general public to use. Note that a lot of content on Google Scholar is blocked by pall-walls. If you are not associated with an organization that pays for this content, you might n