Intercultural Relations Research Guide   Tags: mair; intercultural relations; intercultural communication  

Base your selection of topic on answers to the following:

• Is the topic of interest to me? (You will be looking at it for a long time!) 
• Can I realistically perform the research with the time and resources available to me?
• Will my research present new information and contribute to the field as a whole?

Do some preliminary reading about your topic. Encyclopedias or news magazines can provide:

• Useful keywords
• Overviews of the current status of the topic
• Name of the important scholars in the filed

Begin by learning your way around the library homepage, http://library.pacific.edu. The homepage connects you with a variety of research tools and guides.

Test your topic by searching for it in library catalogs and databases. This provides a preliminary assessment of the viability of your research topic.

At first, your topic will be rather vague and broad; for example, "ethnic identity". Although many topics in this field are clearly interdisciplinary, it is still useful to think about the topic's subject orientation.

For example:

Keyword vs. subject searching: begin by performing a keyword search. In most databases, this will lead to more precise subject terms. Many databases also have online thesauri to help you locate the terms they use.

Boolean operators present subject terms in a manner easily processed by the computer. For example, if your topic is the influence of ethnic identity on marketing to women, you should not type "the effect of women's ethnicity on marketing." Instead, use "AND" and "OR" to construct search statements.

AND to narrow your search to find both terms.

Example: ethnic identity AND marketing

OR to broaden your search to retrieve either of the terms.

Example: women OR females                                                              

Your final search statement could be:

(women or females) AND (ethnic* AND marketing)

Truncation is a search technique that is used by many electronic databases. Usually, but not always, it is the asterisk (*). For example, elect* would retrieve any of the following: elections, election, elective or, unfortunately, electron!