Answered Questions

What an interesting subject! Since you are a student in the graduate nursing program, the best place to start for this topic is the Advanced Nursing LibGuide, located at http://libguides.brenau.edu/DNP. 

 

Click on the yellow tab for Patient Education. In the center of the page, you'll see a list of nursing and education databases where you can search for your topic. All are good choices with excellent collections, but I suggest starting with the nursing database CINAHL PLUS with Full Text. Click on the link to CINAHL PLUS with Full Text  and enter your Brenau username and password. You'll arrive at the main search page.

 

Enter your first search term: for example, try "perspective transformation". Note the quotation marks around the phrase. They tell the search engine to only look for articles where those two words appear side by side, which focuses your results and eliminates clutter you have to look through. In addition to entering the search term, click the Full Text box just below the search box.

After reviewing your article results from the first search, try another. In the search box at the top of the results page, enter further combinations of related terms to find additional relevant materials. Some suggestions:

"transformative learning" - Perspective transformation is a part of Mezirow's transformative learning process, so try using it as a search term to find articles that include it. 

perspective AND "transformative learning" - Note the AND between your terms. This conjunction is a Boolean search technique to tell the search engine that the results need to have both the term and the phrase in each article.

When you are done with CINAHL PLUS with Full Text, try these same searches in another of the nursing databases in the LibGuide list, like MEDLINE with Full Text. 

Since your topic is also covered in the field of education, you should also run your search in the education database ERIC (at EBSCOhost), which is available on the same Patient Education database list. You'll be able to find more in this database by incorporating Mezirow's name, as in the suggested searches below:

 

Mezirow AND perspective - Note the AND between your terms, Boolean search technique!

Mezirow AND transform* - This combination again uses the Boolean technique AND, but adds an asterisk to the term transform*. The asterisk tells the search engine to show articles that include Mezirow and any word that begins with transform (as in transformative or transformation, since the subject relates to both perspective transformation and transformative learning). 

 

Each database has a unique collection, so keep trying different databases if you are not satisfied with your results - you may find additional articles in one database that were not available in the other.

If you need more, respond and let us know!