Research Proposal Assignment

This week as I was working on my research proposal assignment, I found myself frequently referencing Chapter 5 of Luker's book, which deals with literature review. As I was searching through social science databases for articles relevant to my topic: "Social Anxiety Disorder and Online Support Forums", I often felt that I wasn't using the right keywords for my searches. I became apprehensive about whether or not there really wasn't much on my specific intersection of interests, or whether it only seemed that way because my search skills were poor. I ended up using Luker's method of creating a daisy. I used a thesaurus to make sure I had all synonyms covered, and I also tried to look at my topic not only from a social sciences perspective, but also from a technology perspective. The multi-disciplinary nature of research topics these days definitely forces you to be more creative when you think about ways to find information on a topic. It can become a case of not knowing where to begin not because there doesn't seem to be any logical starting point, but because too many starting points are possible.