LBSU 302

Week 4- Finding Articles

My Journey Continues……….      

    Hello fellow bloggers and classmates! I am happy to report that I finally have a

topic narrow enough to have a research question. It has taken way more effort

than I originally planned, but completely worth every hour spent.  When I decided

to change careers, it was something that I had thought about for a long time. It

wasn’t on a whim. However, if it weren’t for this class I wouldn’t fully know what I

was getting into, or what options I would have after school. So for that, I am so

grateful!

Now, on to my weekly research…….

    This week I was interested in the further narrowing of my topic, hoping that I

could come up with a worthy research question. I read a few chapters in my book

from last week and decided that the topic of self-disclosure was of great interest

to me as well as having great significance in the role of a clinical social worker.

As a clinical social worker, you work very closely with individuals with a wide

range of psychosocial problems and disorders, in a clinical setting, providing

counseling and therapy. After doing extensive research this week, and reading

many articles, I have found that therapist self-disclosure is a hot topic that is up

for debate. To self-disclose, or not to self-disclose?  Some research states

therapist self-disclosure is harmful to the patient, and some research states it is a

great tool when used correctly in order to enhance the client-therapist

relationship. Either way, therapists are doing it, and I am sure to some extent I

will be faced with the question at some time in my career, and I want to know

when it is ethical and when it is not.

I had great success this week finding articles relevant to my topic. Finding

scholarly articles was much easier for me than finding books, possibly due to the

vast database of information available at the Leatherby Library. I used almost all

of the advanced search options to narrow down my search. This week I did

something I had not done previously. I chose an additional AND-KEYWORD with

Title as my field. This was extremely helpful in narrowing down articles that had

my keyword actually in the title. At that point I just needed to decide on which one

to choose, because most of the articles had some relevance to my topic. In the

following weeks I hope to find more research that explains ethics in relation to

therapist self-disclosure. Wish me luck!

Thanks again for reading my blog!!! See you next week!!!