Week 6 Assignment

Part one:

Since the 18th century, how and why has industrialization in Europe and the USA changed the demographic and social system in terms of individual's wealth?

Part two:

a. The main concepts here are 1. Industrialization and 2. Change in individual income/wealth

b. Indust* AND (Wealth OR Income OR Money)

I would have like to also include something like 'AND (Demographics OR "Social Structure")' here, but I worry that this would have narrowed the search too far to find enough reasonable articles.

c. For the search I had to tweak it a bit until I got some results that were what I was mostly looking for. What I finally used was: industrialization in the united states AND (Wealth OR Income OR Money)

d. The two database limiters I used were both to limit the sources to scholarly articles, as well as limiting the publication date of the articles from 1998 to 2018 to get more relevant and recent articles.

Part three:

The main things I learned in doing this was that searching in databases is a little more difficult than simply to generate a search statement. After developing a research question and then a search statement I thought that it would be a cinch to search the database, but it didn't turn out that way. After completing the search I got a lot of unnecessary articles, as well as articles that weren't even related to what I wanted. For example - economics of cigarettes. After my first search didn't work very well, added the 'AND (Demographics OR "Social Structure")' and this didn't help at all. I was still getting quite poor results. After going back to the main page and typing industrialization in, industrialization in the united states popped up in the search terms and I used that along with my second part of the search statement. This worked much better than before, and despite still having some irrelevant articles I was able to get quite a few good ones pertaining to my subject. Using the database limiters were also extremely useful to result in high-quality and recently published articles. Overall, I would say that rather than spending a lot of time developing a research statement, testing it by searching in the database and iterating upon it after a few searches would be the best way to do it. I would also say that one search statement may not fit everything you need for your research question. For example the search that I finally ended up using focused on industrialization in the USA, while I still had to worry about Europe.