Learn about my Screencast-O-Matic!

In my Screencast-O-Matic video, I had many technical difficulties, and I apologize for that. I am sure you can hear my frustration in the video. To recap my video: I changed my topic, again, but I am sticking with this one. I am researching isolation and the effects it had on mental health during quarantine. I am in the very beginning stages of this topic, so my research at this moment is getting a better understanding of my subject. I am struggling to choose between my study group being freshman in college that lost the end of their senior year or middle-aged adults that were essential workers, working from home, or laid off. Other than that, I am very intrigued by this topic because of how relevant it is in today’s world with what is going on. With my other topics, I was slightly struggling brainstorming ideas of questions, but as Dr. Gagich said in class, these questions are so relevant they come naturally.

Now to discuss research: I thought I preferred CSU Library Database, but after conducting even further research, I retract my statement. Although I cannot seem to get the CSU Library to connect properly to Google Scholar, I have been finding myself preferring it over the others. The “Cited By” feature is extremely handy, and I use it to find related topics. Google Scholar has many studies that have been done in other countries on similar questions. Although this may not be useful in my actual study, it gives me a much better understanding of similar studies going on around the world and other ideas to bounce my own research off of. The CSU Library Database has been much easier finding data that is more specific to what I think I will be centering my data around. It is also much easier to know that I will have complete access to the article.

The biggest successes I have had so far have been finally securing a topic, and finding a full text article on maintaining mental health in quarantine in CSU’s library. This article was a big find for me because it is broad and taught me a lot about my topic. Originally, I found this article on Google Scholar, and though I did not have access to the entire text, I was still able to use it to find similar text because it was cited twenty-three times. The most frustrating part has been technical errors with the Mendeley software. The last two days I have been unable to add texts to my library because it crashes every time, as I am sure you saw in the screen recording. Despite that, I think the research process is going great, and I am really glad I decided on this topic.