Hi
I was wondering if someone could help me. I am new to DA, am using it to conduct qualitative research for my undergrad thesis.
My question for my thesis is “what are young adults (age 18-25) saying about mental illness/health online?”
I have used the keywords young adults, mental illness using the operators as suggested but having a tough time honing in on specific searches that are relevant.
Any help/suggestions are greatly appreciated.
Thank you!
Perhaps there are methodological problems with those search terms.
Especially if you are looking for primary sources, blogs and the like, I suspect that writers are unlikely to refer themselves as “young adults”. More likely, you will have to look for other evidence – often circumstantial evidence – that a writer is in the desired age group.
You may need to expand the “mental illness” element of the query to include, as OR terms, related terms such as anxiety, paranoia, schizophrenia, neurosis, etc. You may be able to build additional terms into your query by inspecting terms used in some of your preliminary results. Note: Although the first line of your query should not include more than 10 terms (exclusive of operators), you are free to add additional terms in the second query line.
Thank you Bill, I appreciate your response.
I have been using other words and OR and then I get no results! I don’t know what I am doing wrong!!
Perhaps its just the blog function I am having a hard time finding anything even though this is one of the most important parts of our research, it will something I will need to play with.
Thanks again
one of the problems you may have is that forums like those at psychcentral.com for the mentally ill that are frequented by young adults refuse to be indexed by search engines in order to enforce promises of confidentiality to the community-- although many psych students go there to read the blogs for their research.