Embarking Upon a Research Strategy

¶ … Strategy Used for Searching the Literature When embarking upon a literature search on my dissertation's topic of human trafficking, I used two major sources. The first was government reports on the topic. Given that human trafficking is an immigrant and homeland security-related issue and a number of acts of recent legislation have been passed to protect victims, there is ample information available on legitimate government sites (with internet addresses followed by a .gov).

The second major sources of information were databases of peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic, which allowed me to explore research on the psychological effects of trafficking and to gain a better understanding of its social and psychological implications. I used library databases such as ProQuest which I could filter according to date, peer-reviewed status, and keywords.

ProQuest has a broad array of articles with a heavy focus on the social sciences, which is useful in researching a topic like human trafficking, an area of study which encompasses sociology, psychology, and international relations. I decided to focus upon extracting journal articles to gain an understanding of what scholars in my field were researching. However, ProQuest also provides access to newspaper and magazine articles as well as other sources, which could be useful to extract recent information for case studies or anecdotal experience.

After filtering ProQuest for articles published within the last five or so years, for peer-reviewed status, and for scholarly journal articles, I perused the titles for areas of research specific to my dissertation. I was particularly interested in articles which dealt with gender-related issues and which were rich sources of verified statistical data on the subject of trafficking.

But, given that my qualitative research will be focused upon scenarios involving very specific women, I also looked at case studies which profiled specific national population groups and areas, to see how such studies were organized as well as to gain a better understanding of the subject matter in general. For further research leads, I can also look at the bibliographies of former research conducted on my topic in my current, chosen articles. At present, the articles I have chosen on the topic are specific to the dissertation topic.

But I could also explore interrelated areas such as the effects of sexual abuse, the labor market in the U.S., and treatment for PTSD. Country-specific research might also be required. Researching the literature also alerted me to some potential problems. For.