For the final PHI208 assignment, you are asked to research a specific ethical or social issue in one of the following three categories:
- an ethical issue or social problem in your local community (neighborhood, town, city, school district, religious community, local politics, water safety, housing issues, etc.)
- an ethical issue in your current job
- an ethical issue in your field of study
Your first step will be to decide which of the three categories you will choose, and then narrow in on a specific ethical issue or social problem related to it.
If you need help getting ideas for an ethical issue in the category you chose, one option is to do some background research in the library. The Credo Reference database provides short encyclopedia articles on topics and can be a great place to get ideas for a topic to choose from.
Here are the steps to do background research in Credo Reference:
1. Select the grey Encyclopedias & Dictionaries button on the library's homepage.
2. Select the link to Credo Reference
3. Type the general topic you are researching into the search box followed by the word Ethics. For example, nursing ethics, police ethics, early childhood education ethics, etc.
4. Review a short article or two on the topic and decide on an ethical issue found in the article. For example, if researching nursing ethics, you might decide to choose "patient advocacy" as your topic.
Once you have your ethical issue decided on, you can go to the library's homepage and use Library OneSearch to find some scholarly articles on your topic. We recommend Library OneSearch because it searches most of the library's collection at once and will bring back the largest number of relevant results. Here are some search tips:
1. Select the Advanced Search link within the Library OneSearch box, which will provide you with three separate search boxes in which to enter your search terms.
2. Once on the Advanced Search page, enter the concepts you want to search into the search boxes, using one concept per box. For example, if your research topic is Nursing and your subtopics were patient advocacy and ethics, you could try the following search:
In the first box, type nursing. In the second box, type patient advocacy. In the third search box, type ethics (we recommend adding ethics as a search term for any topic chosen for this assignment). Then select Search.
3. You can also try field searching which makes use of the drop-down menu to the right of the search boxes and can help further refine your results by telling the database to search for keywords in a specific category or field. You can try different combinations to see how your results change. Some helpful options include:
- TI Title: brings back articles with the search terms in the title of the article.
- SU Subject: returns articles where search terms are listed as a major topic of the article.
- AB Abstract: searches for the words in the summary of the article.
This screenshot illustrates field searching in action, changing the default Select a Field (optional) to one of the drop-down options:
4. Scroll down the page to the Filters section, then select the Limit to Scholarly/Peer Reviewed limiter to only display scholarly, peer-reviewed sources.
Another time-saving tip is to select the title of the article on the results page to bring up the detailed record. From here, scroll down the page to view the abstract, which is a summary of the article. Reading this will help you decide if the article is relevant to your topic and worthwhile to click on and read in its entirety.
If you still have questions you can chat in real-time with a librarian here.