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Psychology, Sociology and Human Development: Home

Resources for psychology, sociology, family studies and human development.

Use the databases listed below to search the behavioral sciences literature.

Search Tip

Scholarly/peer-reviewed journal articles are written by and for experts in the discipline. Students are not the target audience, but it's essential you use them. As a result, they tend to be very narrow in focus (more narrow than typical student paper topics). Translation: You may not find any scholarly articles that neatly summarize your broader topic. This is ok and expected. Instead, you may need to find several articles that cover smaller parts of your topic and stitch that information together into a broader whole.

How to Start

To better understand (and write about) a research topic, and to effectively search the literature, you should first determine and define the main concepts involved. Find an encyclopedia or Wikipedia entry on that concept (this is called "background reading". Example Wikipedia article on Human Services). You don't normally use this as a source in your academic writing, but it will give you an historical context (how has the thing, theory, or technology evolved over time?, what people, laws and policies are involved?). This will also help you find the correct terminology for searching the scholarly literature. Once you have a handle on your concept(s), you'll be better equipped to search the journal, book and other literature, using the "Search Tools" section to the left.

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