 Hi, this is Joanna Schurr-Mack. I am your UTM Psychology librarian. I think we've met on a number of occasions, at least in Psych 100, probably a couple of other times. I'm really thrilled to offer you a series of asynchronous videos about writing searchable questions. So I know that you're going to cover some of that in class, but I think it will be useful to take a quick look at how a professional librarian does it. There will be differences because, again, what happens within disciplines matters. So you will have the disciplinary view as given by your professors. I think having both my insight into this might help you a little bit to find your way through composing searchable research questions. So what I'm going to do right now is share my screen and grab a PowerPoint, a set of slides that I prepared for you specifically about this. I'm just going to make it full screen so it's a little bit easier for us to look at. And I'll take you through it. I'll narrate what happens in this PowerPoint and you will have this set of slides available to you, as well as the organizers that I will mention and of course work through with you in this video. So what are we doing today? We're going to be looking just at how to make searchable research questions and their strategies for those called concept organizers. Let's take a look at these concept organizers and searchable questions. So it is hard to get focused when you are doing literature searches, and of course we'll cover the types of literature searches in video one. But there are two ways to get started. One of them is by writing questions that are easy to break down into concepts and easy to search with. And then, of course, to do that we will use concept organizers. The other way to really get focused is by doing the structured search approach that we'll do in video two. And let's take a look at a question. So let's say that I'm interested in looking at how the quality of sleep affects strategic decision making and risk-taking behaviors. Note that there are a few things here I did not specify. So let's think about this. Is this a focused searchable question? Well, we've got about four things we can really look at. First of all, some big overall big picture questions like, well, how does the quality of sleep for whom or what, right? And then how do we measure the quality of sleep? Of course, what is decision making and what are we interested in when it comes to decision making behaviors? And what are the risk-taking behaviors we might be interested in? Let's take a look at all of them. The first one is, in a sense, the most decisive, the most exciting. So not only are we asking about how to quantify the effects of sleep, but we really need to ask, on whom? Is it humans that we're worried about? Are we looking at human behavior? Are we investigating how the quality of sleep affects the behavior of human beings? And then, of course, what kinds of human beings? Who? And so this is a question about population. And the reason why I'm using this word will become very obvious in a few minutes when we look at the PICO organizer. Population is who you are studying. And it doesn't have to be humans. It could be rodents. Obviously, rodents sleep. They dream. There's a lot going on, right? Mole rats can be studied as well. That's one of the unique populations we have at UTM. But many studies look at humans. Of course, we could look at simians. We could even look at social insights. So all of that is very important. So deciding on the population is absolutely key. And that will, in many ways, determine how we're going to answer two, three, and four. So thinking about the quality of sleep, we should definitely ask ourselves, what are we looking for? The kind of healthy sleep, let's say eight hours of sleep. Are we going to be measuring how many REM episodes? So rapid eye movements, episodes are happening. Or are we going to be going with instruments that are self-reported? Let's say insomnia, insomnia severity index, sleep hygiene practice scales, and various other scales like that. Now, once we've decided or at least been sensitized to some of these issues, we have decision-making, right? So again, we have to ask ourselves, if we're studying humans, what kinds of decision-making are we studying and so forth? So are we looking at the style of the decisions? Are we looking at the outcomes? Are we looking at the impacts of these decisions? And there are many different kinds of scales that we could use for that. We'll talk about that in a second. And then finally, since we're mainly looking at a quantitative kind of study, there is the measurement of risk. So there are many scales we could use for general kinds of risk behaviors. Or there are specific kinds of risk behaviors such as gambling, and they're actually very exciting scales. So having looked at all of these things, what else can we make a note of? Well, definitely the participants. Also the selection mechanism of the participants. And are we going to have a control population, for example? Do we select the participants or are they self-selected? And then are the participants healthy? Or do they have conditions that might affect sleep quality? So let's say chronic migraines, depression, diabetes, a host of other health conditions. Well, that's big. We've got a few other things as well that we can look at. And one thing that I mentioned is really studying human decision-making processes and scales. So if you select to work with humans, you can go to the decision-making individual differences inventory. So you may want to go to the link I gave you or to the original paper describing this. So there's lots to study there. And of course, if you also are considering specific times during which this study could be conducted, it could be a retrospective study. It could be looking at the pandemic or maybe considering sleep quality during specific events or trigger events. So do we actually need a more focused question? Was that finessing an analysis process, pardon me, sufficient? Or could we write a more focused question? What would it look like? Well, so first of all, we really have to ask ourselves, what review type are we doing? So is it going to be a narrative review? Is it going to be a scoping review? Because the kind of review you're doing really determines the methodology and the early steps you need to take to determine how you're going to conduct both the search and the analysis of what you find. In a scoping review, and I'll mention that one briefly in video one, you would explore each of the points that we've just analyzed. So the four points with extras through what we call inclusion and exclusion criteria. And these are a formal part of your protocol because a scoping review can, doesn't have to, should have a protocol, especially if you're dealing with human health and healthcare issues. And now many other review types, especially narrative reviews, do not have a protocol. And in that case, the inclusion and exclusion criteria lead you to focusing your question. Once you focus the question, you can benefit from running broader searches and narrower searches within the limits of the variables that you selected. And of course, the process that we've just conducted helps you to focus on all the important things. There'll be, of course, organizers that will help us even further because sometimes you're stuck when you're looking at your question. You wonder what is the population here or what is the intervention that I'm looking at, right? But in the case of a literature review for empirical work that you're conducting, you can definitely do a more focused research question and then conduct both sensitive and more precise searches. And we've talked a little bit about that. So how could we write a more focused question guided by what we've done already? Well, first of all, we select participants based on what you're interested in. And we could go as fine as selecting the age bracket as well. And we look at a specific kind of the quality of sleep problem. So in our case, let's select sleep deprivation. And of course, we would define it based on a source in literature or based on a well-known reference. We would look at, in this case, instead of outcome or maybe styles, we would look at the quality. So the outcome will, quality affects outcome, right? So it's not a specific outcome we're looking at, but rather in general, how does the person come out based on their decisions, right? So we are looking at scales that will allow us to determine the quality. So is it better or worse for, let's say, maximizing, in this case, the amount of winnings in their gambling behaviors, right? So we've got participants, healthy humans in a certain age bracket. We really want adults and we can specify that further when we run slightly more precise searches. We are looking at sleep deprivation. We're looking at the quality of decision making. So it's outcome directed, but not a specific outcome. And we're looking at gambling. So a kind of risk-taking behavior that has a lot of scales associated with it. So our question now looks like this. How does the quality of gambling decisions change as a function of stimulant use for healthy sleep-deprived adults? So why are we looking at stimulant use? Well, we know that the quality of sleep, at least we hypothesize, is going to change or make the quality of the decisions possibly worse. And we know that stimulant use can improve or at least speed up cognitive function, right? So we want to see whether or not gambling decisions change when we give our participants stimulants after they've been sleep deprived, right? So we have a fairly tight, fairly precise question that we're dealing with right now. And if you're doing your own research and you have specific needs, you may want to look, for example, at a specific gambling inventory. So you may be looking at performance in gambling measured by, let's say, this specific idle gambling task inventory. And how does that change as a function of caffeine or other stimulant intake for healthy sleep-deprived participants aged 18 to 65? So you see how you can move from a specific but still fairly open literature search question to a question that is really very precise that you're interested in. So now let's grab a concept map organizer. It's the simplest organizer that helps us to break down the concept inner question just into the most significant concepts. And you'll see that even there, there are some changes that you could make just based on the process that we've been going through. So let's take a look at this. How does the quality of gambling decisions change as a function of stimulant use for healthy sleep-deprived adults? Well, we know we've got at least four things going here for us. So we've got a population that's going to be healthy adults. But the very first thing we encounter here is the quality of gambling decisions. So I'm going to just put in gambling decisions because a word like quality is difficult to pin down and it's fairly common. Now, what are we doing? What's the intervention? Another word that we'll show up in a moment. Well, it's stimulant. It's the use of stimulant to improve or to change the quality of decisions. So we've got the thing that we're measuring, gambling decisions. We've got our intervention, stimulant use. Now we've got our population. So we've got healthy adults and there's a condition that they have, which is sleep deprivation. The next thing we want to do with our organizer is to think about broader and newer concepts or synonyms that can be used to describe the four that we've selected here. So we can look at risk-taking, which is much broader. We can look at gambling addiction, a specific kind of behavior. I don't think that would work too well because we're looking about healthy adults. So addiction behaviors may take us outside of the range of healthy. We would have to think about that. Or we can just look at general gambling behaviors as opposed to decision-making. So that will, again, take us into a broader study. Now, when we're looking at stimulants here, we can get very interesting and very creative because there are different kinds of stimulants that we may have easy access to. Caffeine, various kinds of amphetamines. And here are a couple of specific amphetamines. So we also want to know a little bit more about sleep deprivation. And here it is fairly specific, but we may want to, again, go broader for sleep quality, sleeplessness. That would not be the same as sleep deprivation, but maybe we also want to take a look at that and chronic lack of sleep. How does that differ from sleep deprivation? So there's a variety of concepts there. So now what we can do is, once we've split up these parts of a question into a simple organizer, we can use an organizer that helps us with research decision-making. And these are incredibly common in healthcare research. So I really want you to be exposed to this because as you move on and start working in healthcare context, the PCOTE organizer is extremely common. And you will also find it if you do systematic or scoping reviews. So the main thing about the PCOTE organizer looks, it reminds you about making sure you've got a population, making sure you're thinking about the comparison or control. And then thinking also about the type of study. So these are the basic questions that the PCOTE organizer asks you to make it easier for you to analyze and break down your research question. So here's what we've done to our question. So for the population, we've got our healthy adults and we still need to know more about the selection and recruitment mechanisms. We've got our intervention, which is administering stimulants. We've got our control, which is the group that gets the placebo and the gate, they're both healthy sleep deprived participants. And we want to see what our outcome is. And that is how the performance on the gambling tasks as measured by probably one of the inventories changes with the use of stimulant versus placebo for these sleep deprived individuals, right? So is it better? Is it worse? Is there a measurable effect? The type of study in this case, it is going to definitely be some sort of quantitative empirical study. And just to make it more interesting, as some of you might be going into qualitative healthcare and qualitative type work later on, a type of analysis tool for research questions that is very popular in qualitative health research is the spider. This stands for sample phenomenon of interest design. So that's research design evaluation and research type. So our sample again is our healthy adult individuals and that are recruited a certain way again, when a certain age bracket, we've got a phenomenon of interest. So the effect of stimulants or placebos on gambling decisions for our sleep deprived adults, because we know there's a relationship between poor cognitive performance and sleep deprivation. We also know that stimulants have an effect on cognitive performance. Now, when we look at the outcomes, so when we do our evaluation, we really want to know whether there is altered cognitive performance as a result of the stimulant intake for our sleep deprived adults and that will be measured with a task test or indicator. And finally, for a research type, we want quantitative research, but spider is also very used for either mixed methods or qualitative research. And that's why I've also offered it to you as a stand as a good second, second try after the very famous and very widely used Pico organizer, but Pico doesn't work with all questions. So this is it. This is really it. So this tells you, this tells you first of all that you're, you're never alone with your research question. There are ways for you to try to break it down and tease out what we interest you about it and what are the important points about it that may be implied like the population or your recruitment strategy. What we're going to do now is to do a tiny, tiny recap of some of the search terminology because you've mentioned, you've heard me pardon me mentioned as searches that are focused searches that are so searches that are precise as focused or sensitive. So I just want to run through that very quickly. And by the way, I will provide a fillable word document with all three concept map, the Pico organizer and a spider so you can play around with your research question. So let's do a very, very brief search strategy recap. So remember that searches that are inclusive and really try to tease out all the literature on the topic are called sensitive and precise searches on the other hand return a few well defined results on a topic that's usually well known. So, in your case, when you're doing a major literature review you do need to run some sensitive searches to really explore your topic, but very often you still run precise searches before doing them after to get at a, at a concept to get maybe at something that you know has a very definite very definite answer so you never run just one search, you use both. Now to improve the sensitivity of a search that seems to be too precise using Boolean operator or is always the best strategy as well as using several different databases. If you want to improve precision using the and operator and using further limits are always the best strategies. Now, let's look at a couple of these examples. So if you're just writing a search for alcohol and homicide. What happens when you expand alcohol to alcoholic alcoholism and all of these related terms or intoxicated intoxication or drunk drunkenness or integrated integration and so forth, and then you end it with homicide. What do you think you're going to get. Is it going to be a more precise search. Or is it going to be a sensitive search. So remember, when you're using or or is more and every time you get more results, you get sensitivity. So this is a more sensitive search strategy. Now what about this. If you're looking for alcohol and violence and you change your search to look for alcohol and violence in Canada. Well you're actually making the search more precise because you're adding more limits every time you add a limit you make a search more precise and and you get fewer results that are more focused. So if you are looking for alcohol and homicide, but you want to look for a phrase called intoxication related homicide. So very specific phrase, you are making your search more precise in fact in some cases much more precise because you are excluding all other variants of a phrase, and only look at precision. So strategies for both will be important and we'll come back to that way in our video too, but we'll be doing our structured search.