Skip to main content

Sociology II: Social Life

Course Number: SY103

Subject: Sociology

In-Class Writing Exercise

Your Hypothetical Paper Topic: Use Hochschild’s theory of emotional labor (2012) to analyse a single profession (such as nursing, teaching, policing, sex trade work, professional sports, etc.)

What you're about to do:

Pick a hypothetical paper topic & state it clearly: “My hypothetical paper focused on emotional labour in [insert name of profession].”

Then, using the tools and tips you learned last time and again today, search the library to: 

2. Find 3 relevant academic journal articles that you would use to write this paper.

3. Write up a bibliographical entry for all three academic journal articles using the American Sociological Association bibliography formatting.

Here is a full copy of your ICWE assignment. 

Tips to Find and Work with Academic Sources

Tip #1 Where You Search Matters

Different search tools (e.g. Omni - the Library search tool, Google, etc.) are built to do different things.

Use the peer-reviewed journals checkbox to limit results to academic sources.

Tip #2 Search Tactics Improve Results

Try some of the search tactics below.

What is the tactic?

What does the tactic do?

Examples

Phrase searching

Use “quotation marks” to find more than one term in a row.

"emotional labour"

Truncation

Use an asterisk* at the end of a term to include multiple endings.

labo*

labor, labour

Boolean AND

Use AND to ensure that all terms appear in every search result.

"emotional labour" AND nursing

Boolean OR

Use OR to ensure that at least one term appears in every search result.

nursing OR "medical professional"

Tip #4 Choose Sources Strategically

Chart outlining some of the strategies when doing a search, which are duplicated in the Description section.

Description 
  • Start early and read strategically: Read article abstracts first and use a book's table of contents.
  • Can you access it? If not, ask your librarian (mrohweder@wlu.ca).
  • What's the publication date? Try to find recent research.
  • Is it original research? Peer-reviewed journals publish different types of articles.
  • What kind of research is it? Are you prepared to work with the research you see?
  • Who are the authors? Are you representing different perspectives in the sources you choose?

Tip #5: Use A Research Chart

Using a Research Chart can be an easy way to keep track of your work and your research. I've included one here designed to help with this in-class writing assignment, but it can be adapted to any research assignment. Please make a copy or download one for yourself. 

Citations

Purdue's ASA Citation Guide is an excellent resource for building your citations and provides tons of examples.

Page Owner: Peter Genzinger

Page Feedback

Last Updated: