How My Research Lead to a Deeper Understanding of My Topic and Research Process - WEEK 3

The knowledge that I gained about my topic are the many different fields of study that neuropsychology encompasses, prior to this research, my knowledge of this subject was limited to what I knew, which was not as much as I thought I knew.  Now I understand the many advances that have been made regarding numerous cognitive disorders, including “study results on the leading edge of neuroscience research,” Villalba, E., & Costa, A. (2013).  The most interesting or surprising thing that I learned was that neuropsychology does not only study the causes cognitive dysfunction whether it’s a disease, an accident or it’s hereditary condition, but also, that this field uses neuroscience to treat pain by tapping into certain parts of the brain, in a word: Fascinating.

I read the assigned reading in the class text book, Research Strategies - Finding Your Way Through The Information Fog, and still had questions, so I decided to send the author an email.  Mr. William Badke was responsive, friendly and also, very helpful.  He was not bothered by my email (which I feared), he was very responsive and happy to help, I now follow him on Facebook and plan to read more of his books when I can find the time.  So through my conversation with him, once I determined the book that I would choose for the assignment, I told him that I did a Boolean search as follows:  Neuropsychology AND Psychotherapy AND Field, I explained what I was looking for, and ask if this was the most intelligent search that I could do for my topic, I have Mr. Badke’s permission to post his response, which was as follows:

William Badke

"I think the question is OK, especially if you define several facets of being dominant, e.g. how many publications in each field, how representative scholars view their relative importance, and so on.  The challenge may be to overcome the possibility that the two fields may be mutually exclusive so that psychotherapy is important for psychotherapists and neurophysiology is important for neurophysiologists, but the two groups don’t interact much. All of that is a pretty convoluted answer to say that the question might be difficult to move forward, but there are ways to address it by thinking through your direction." 

Now that gave me a lot to think about, and I was very grateful for the help.

If you are reading this Mr. Badke, please feel free to make a comment on my blog.  Thank you.

Here are my Research Notes:

1. Began searching the Leatherby Libraries’ online catalog (really, even though this was in the sample).

2. I used the eBook Databases, and then selected eBooks on EBSCOhost.

3. Since I’m interested in Neurobiophysiology vs. psychotherapy, which field of study is more dominant in the field of psychology, I did a Boolean search as follows: Neurobiophysiology AND psychology AND Field.

4. My search yielded zero results , the message: “No results were found”          

5. I went to Google just to search the word Neurobiophysiology and it corrected me to Neurobiol Physiology, that is not what I am looking for, so I decided to change my first word to “Neuropsychology.”

6. My second search was: Neuopsychology AND psychology AND Field.  In the left column, I selected Limit to: “Full text”

7. The first book that jumped out at me was Horizons in Neuroscience Research, which was item #4 in my search.

8. The first thing that I selected was the “table of contents link” to scan the contents of the book.  I was able to drill down into the sections of each chapter.  The book had me with the chapter titles, as I drilled down for detail, I liked the book even more.

9. Next, I selected the link to “Most relevant pages from this eBook” – it displayed two separate chapter pages and a conclusion page.  Wow, this class is AMAZING – this new knowledge of searching will help me immensely through the rest of my life!!!!

10.  I downloaded the first 100 pages of the book in PDF, I still don’t know why I was limited, but I will attempt to download the last 49 pages.  I have enough of the book to review it for my assignment.

My frustrations not knowing exactly how to break down what I am looking for, I always thought that I was so intelligent when it came to doing on-line searches, I would type long sentences into Google or Bing, as if I was having a conversation with the search engine, and it understood the information that I needed, like a mind reader.  Of course I feel very silly now, and know that I have many different options for searching and know that there is a specific way to find information that I need AND the rules are constantly changing.

What I am hoping to find out as I continue my search is to narrow down the part of the field that I am most interested in so I can do an internship and move forward with my new career.

The book I selected:

Horizons in Neuroscience Research

Villalba, E., & Costa, A. (2013)

Link to eBook on ebscohost