Day 30

I finally managed to find a way to look for more journals and to find more articles, ironically by tweaking my search term from a noun to a verb. Somehow it appears that more articles appear when I use "aging" as opposed to "elderly" or "older adults". This is odd as I was previously aware of the need to find as many synonyms as the word you were searching for, but I had not thought that looking for a similar word in a different form would work. However I still have more articles on help-seeking behaviour for the elderly than I do on counselling for the elderly itself (though I need to double check this to see exactly how many articles I have of each type), and it feels like help-seeking articles were easier to find than counselling articles. This still does not detract however from how happy I am that I managed to find a search term that works, as well as figuring out finally how to make proper use of Ovid as an article search engine.

I am very pleased that I managed to find quite a few good articles through this search method though. Ploughing through each article will be a bit of a time-consumer however, gauging by how it took me almost the entire afternoon to plough through a 27 page article. I remember I used to actually skip the main methodology sections and jump straight past results as well and to discussion back when I was first starting university. Obviously along the way we were told that to do so would be entirely silly as then we would not be able to tell if the results reported by the researchers were actually as significant as they claimed them to be, and if the implications they drew were actually credible. Thankfully the more articles I read, the more I begin to get the hang of what each statistic or number means, and my past experience in research modules has helped as well.

I have also (finally) started thinking of themes and headings and some sort of basic structure for the literature review, although I still have a lot to work on for it as I am not sure how to craft it as yet. I am still doing the basic summaries of each article, so that I know how to group the literature and find out what points I can draw on from each article. The difficult part right now is figuring out what I want to present in the literature review, and how relevant it is going to be to what is necessary for the review.Hopefully I can start getting something out by the end of the week, if not I will be lagging quite far behind I feel.