Journal Entry #5 - Youth and Technology: Keyword Searching

I found that I prefer keyword searching whenever possible.  I also tended to go into one article and follow the "other works that cited this" list links to other promising pages until it was hard to remember where exactly I started searching.  It got difficult to back track but I did find some good articles this way. 

I also liked scanning the reference list of the articles I found were well done to see what references they used.  Before checking if I had access to those other articles though I would check the date to help determine how relevant they may be to my research.  Since technology changes so rapidly, the more recent the article the more likely I was to consider looking further into it. 

Search words/combinations used:

• first search was "youth" and "technology"
• then started searching "youth" and
• "social networking"
• "mobile technology"
• "grieving"
• "started using "teens" and "teenagers" instead of "youth" with various other keywords such as
• technology
• cell phones
• texting
• social networks
• started searching "social networks" paired with other keywords such as
• social skills
• communication
• politics
• grieving
• found that when searching social networks, the majority of research tended to focus on teens rather then adults as opposed to when I was searching for "technology" or "Internet" I needed to specify "youth" or "teens"