Social work, Social care and Community Studies

It is incredibly important to find and use good quality, up to date literature and evidence!

You need to develop good research skills to ensure that you can find the most appropriate evidence to base your assignment answers upon and then translate this into your professional practice.

The resources here will help you to develop these skills:

• how to construct search strategies.
• how to apply the approach in multiple databases.
• how to evaluate information.

Within this section, you will also find information related to:

• understanding research methodology.
• critical appraisal tools.
• research terms.
• how to keep a record of your research. 

If you find you need to use evidence-based resources in your work, we encourage you to take a look at the Health guide linked below.

There will be a lot of reading and researching.

When you study and work within health and social care, you will need to engage with a broad range of research and sometimes this will involve a high level of reading to make sure you are making decisions and basing assignments answers  on valid, accurate, appropriate, academic and professional level information.

Use our expertise

SearchStart is a good place to begin, as it has a lot of information about how to begin your research journey and is aimed at new to Hallam students.

As you progress through your time at Hallam, the complexity of assignments will increase and you will need to use a variety of research skills and approaches to ensure you are effectively and comprehensively finding the evidence you need to get the top grades!

To support you at all the stages of your research, we have created a handy reading list of books covering researching in this field.

The list has been created by the subject librarians who support departments related to health and social care. Many of the books are available as eBooks with print copies in either Collegiate or Adsetts Library. Most of these titles begin at the basics so it's a good idea to get yourself into a couple of them before you start!

The list is accompanied by a range of videos covering how to get the most out of key databases.

• When you have found at least one article that is very relevant to your research, you can use Citation Searching, which is where you use a source to find other sources that are linked to it.
• This technique is also known as 'Pearl Growing' or 'Snowballing', and it can be particularly useful if you are struggling to find much research on your topic.
• You can look for sources that were referenced in your original article, sources that cited your original article, and sources by the same author.
• The video below shows you how to apply this technique using one of the multi-disciplinary databases, Scopus.
• You can also Web of Science or Google Scholar for citation searching in a similar way.

It's really important when you begin your research to keep a record of where and how you found your information.

Sometimes, you may want to refer back to information either to:

• clarify or check your understanding.
• share with a classmate or tutor.
• check the information details to ensure you can cite and reference it correctly.

Which means, if you don't know where you got it from, it will be difficult to do the above!

There are other benefits related to keeping a record of your search strategies

• it is evidence that your academic work is developing and using good quality resources.
• you may need to replicate or evidence your research strategy as part of your assignment. If this is required, it will be covered in your assessment brief along with what information is required and how it should be presented.

There are multiple ways that you can keep a record:

• export your search history
• make notes
• use a table where you can map your research strategy.

Here is an example of how a table could be constructed:

The design of the table is flexible and you can amend it to suit how you work. For example, adding in a column for the date the search was run is a really useful way to improve the above table.

PRISMA Flow Diagram

You may be required to, or you might like to, use a PRISMA flow diagram to record how many results you find at each step of your search, how many results you included or excluded each time, and why results were excluded. 

What is a critical appraisal tool?

That is a really good question! Critical appraisal tools are items that can help you assess research. They could take the form of worksheets or checklists.

If you are unsure whether the use of these tools is appropriate or required for your assignment, please check with the person that set your assignment.

There are many different critical appraisal tools you can use. Here are a few of the most commonly used:

How to reference a critical appraisal tool

You can cite and reference the tool using the website format in the version of APA your course is using either 6th or 7th.

Lets talk evaluation!

You have run your searches and found lots of information but how do you know if it is good enough for use at university?  Take a look at this handy evaluation checklist to help you decide if the information you have found is what you need!

Systematic reviews are a specific type of research.

It is highly unlikely that any student assignment within an undergraduate and postgraduate programme will be a systematic review. If you have read an assignment brief and think that you are being asked to write a systematic review please check with the person that set the assignment to ensure you are following the assignment requirements.

You may have been asked to do the following:

• take a systematic approach to reviewing the literature
• systematically review literature 
• apply element of the systematic review process

but this does not mean that you are writing a systematic review.

There are useful elements of systematic reviews that can be applied to literature searching and the following books below cover this but do stay within your assignment brief.

This section relates to your final year, end of year project or dissertation.

Below is a video showing you how to search the database APA PsycInfo, which is a particularly relevant database for topics related to mental health and psychology.