Dr. McEntee requires you to cite sociological sources. A sociological source needs to be a scholarly source and either A) written by someone with a degree in sociology/working in the field of sociology or B) published in a sociological journal. So how do we determine if it is sociological?
Many databases have an authors' affiliations section for each article's record. It may indicate either their degree or that they work in a university's sociology department. You may also consider departments like cultural anthropology, human geography, or others mentioned in Dr. McEntee's course materials to be sociological in nature.
If none of the information is available, you can take to a search engine like Google to see what kind of information you can dig up about an author.
Any journal that has sociology (and no other discipline named) in the title or is published by the American Sociological Association (ASA) may be considered a sociological journal. Some big ones to note that do not have sociology in the title, but are indeed sociological journals, are Social Forces, Gender & Society, and Continuity & Change.
Remember for this assignment you are required to find the following as a minimum:
For the research question: Are vaping companies targeting kids with their advertisements?
The first step is to identify the most important parts of the question, the keywords, that get to the base of what we what to research.
The keywords might be:
Now we need to brainstorm some of the different ways we can think about these key concepts. Those alternate keywords can be synonyms, broader, or more narrow terms.
| Vaping | Kids | Advertisements |
|---|---|---|
| e cigarettes | children | advertising |
| electronic cigarettes | adolescents | magazines |
| big tobacco | teenagers | commercials |
| JUUL | teens | marketing |
| nicotine | high school students | celebrity endorsements |
| vaporizers | 13-18 | back to school sales |
| young people | kid friendly flavors |
JUUL is specific brand of vapes; it gets more narrow. Children is just another way to say kids; a synonym. Advertisements are just one facet of marketing; it's more broad. All of these are legitimate ways of coming up with alternate keywords. You never know which one will be best for a particular database or website until you start looking! What works well in one, might not go over very well in another.
Use the same exercise with your own topic. Just grab a sheet of paper and write it down. You want something you can come back to and continue to expand on as you learn more during your searching.