For this assignment, yo u will find articles using a research database of your choice, which are relevant to the topic of Addressing Food Security in North Omaha, Nebraska.

Focusing Your Research Plan

To keep proposal research from feeling overwhelming, it helps to think about research in terms of theproposal sections: namelyProblem, Solution, and Obstacles. This allows you to break down the research process in more manageable chunks and to focus on finding information relevant to each section.

For this assignment as you begin focusing your research and practicing using databases, we will be focusing specifically on researching the Problem Section.

Problem Section Research

As you research the problem section, you'll want to think about both national-level information/data AND local-level information/data.National-level information and data can be used to explain "big picture" concepts related to your topic.For example, if you were arguing that more mental health services are needed at a college, you could use national data about an increasing trend of college students experiencing mental health problems to show that this is a widespread issue. You could also use research that discusses the causes of college student mental health problems and negative impacts if left untreated.

While all of that broader research provides a solid foundation to discuss the big picture of college student mental health issues, you will also need research tailored to the specific community/organization that you are focusing on for your proposal. Because you are asking a specific decision-making group to make a change connected to an group, institution, or place that they have some authority over, they will expect you to detail how the problem manifests locally.Local-level information and data is used to prove that the problem existsinthe community or organization that you are focusing on in your proposal.

Oftentimes local information comes from local newspapers and tv stations; reports from organizations, cities, counties, and state government departments; and from primary research (observation, interviews, surveys). For example, to show that there is a need for mental health services specifically at Nebraska Univeristy, you could look up news stories about college student mental health in the Omaha World-Herald, reports on mental health from the local Health Department and also look at what mental health resources are currently available at Nebraska University through their webpage and identify how they are inadequate. You could also conduct interviews and surveys of people who have first-hand knowledge of the problem.

As you can see, because of the nature of local-level research, it is likely that there will belesscommunity-specific resources found in the databases, so typically databases are most useful for finding the broader, national-level research. That doesn't mean youwon'tfind local-level information in databases, especially newspaper articles, but often a Google search might be a faster method for finding place-specific information.

Select Search Keywords

For your research, you'll want to start by building a list of keywords that you can use for your search.Keywords need to match the words that authors have used when writing articles on that topic. You'll want to pick words that you would expect to see in an article's title or abstract. This will help you get the most relevant articles at the top of your results list.

Focus on the main concepts, avoiding words that are vague or implied. For example, using a general term like "affect" can greatly limit your results. First, an author may only use words for a single, specific effect (e.g. technology use raises student achievement). Second, there are many alternative phrasings that can look at the effects of something (e.g. impact, result, consequence, etc.), and it's unlikely you'll be able to brainstorm them all. You'll get better results if you brainstorm specific effects (e.g. academic achievement) instead of using "affect/effect" as a keyword.

Your Assignment

Remember the topic is: Addressing Food Security in North Omaha, Nebraska.

Please answer the following questions:

1. Thinking about your problem section, describe what kind of information you need to find toestablish that the problem exists? (Remember, this can be national-level research that provides context for your topic.)
2. Explain what kind of information is needed to show that the problem is caused by specific factors?
3. Identify what kind of information is needed to prove thatserious harms are occurring as a result of the problem?
4. Based on your responses in questions 1-3,list 5 keywords (single word or phrases) that you could use in your database searchto find articles related to the information you want to find.
5. Search for articles using a database service, just using the keywords you've generated.Describe the types of article search results that were generated during initial your Discovery searches. How many results came back with one of your keyword searches? Explain how this kind of search result is or isn't useful in helping your research your topic.
6. Now try using some basic search limiters to narrow the parameters of your Discovery search. For example, limit "Publication Date" to articles published within the past 5-10 years. You can also limit where the articles are published. Since our scope is not world-wide, you can focus only on publications from the U.S. by choosing "Geography" and checking the box for United States. Describe the types of article search results that were generated after limiting the parameters of your Discovery search. How many results came back with the limited search? Explain how limiting your database search is more or less useful in researching your topic.
7. Select one article that seems like a good potential source and click on the title to open the article.Please copy and paste the article citation into your response for this assignment question.Choose the MLA citation. If you have any problems generating the citation or copying and pasting it, please describe those problems for your response.
8. In a paragraph (approx. 7-10 sentences), describe your thoughts on using library databases for research. What kinds of experiences have you had with database research before? What pros and cons do you see in using databases versus a Google search? When might it be useful in the future to know how to navigate a library database? What questions do you still have about using library databases for research?