NUR 3200 - Health, Wellness, and Diversity Within Families: Cultures & Countries

CIA World Factbook

Countries, Peoples, and Cultures (ebook series)

These volumes provide insight into the social, cultural, economic, historical, and religious practices of countries around the world.

Other 

These are collections of subject specific online encyclopedias.  Unlike World Book, Britannica, or Wikipedia, they usually cover subjects based on their relevance to a very specific concept or frame of reference rather than trying to address the topic broadly over multiple areas of interest.  For instance, all the entries in the Encyclopedia of World Poverty (2006) would be written to address some aspect of poverty or socioecomomic status, rather than trying to address the topics in very broad and sometimes unrelated ways.

Subject encyclopedias are scholarly sources.

For articles, use QuickSearch or any of the other databases listed in the box above.  (Apply the date limiter when using QuickSearch).

If you use JSTOR, be aware of the dates.  JSTOR tends to cover culture well because it covers anthropology and other social sciences, but it has a lot of old articles because it is a journal backfile.

You can also use CINAHL if you are focusing on health-related issues. PsycINFO might also be a good place to search for any aspects related to psychology, but for the other topics, it is a good idea to stay with QuickSearch since the other topics are not strictly health care related.

Note: QuickSearch finds both books and articles.  If you are looking for articles, you can use the check box on the left for Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals. If you are struggling to find relevant and current scholarly articles in QuickSearch, contact the Nursing Librarian for suggestions about how you might broaden your search.  The search term combinations below are just examples.  They may work for some ethnic groups and cultures but not for others.

Search on your topic or ethnic group:

For some groups, there may be relatively few results for the specific aspect you are trying to search, so you may need to broaden your search by dropping out certain keywords.  You should try to think of other terminology that might be useful for your searching (caps don’t matter in the databases):

"Irish American*" or "Irish immigrant*" or ("first generation Irish") or ("second generation Irish") or ("third generation irish") or (Irish and health and "united states”)

For instance, if your topic were Filipino Americans, don’t just search Filipino Americans, you should also try your search on Filipinos. 

Filipinos or filipino american*

Along with your search on the group, use other terminology for the topics that may be described in your syllabus or rubric.

 You may have to use background sources, do some brainstorming on your own, and try different combinations of keywords to determine which of them work best for your particular group. 

If any of your searches for specific aspects are getting strange results, adding and cultur*  to the same search may help narrow it and make it more relevant. You can also try words like cross-cultural or transcultural in the search.

Use the links below to search for titles in the Wright State University Catalog and the OhioLINK Catalog.

Check out these video tutorials for assistance on searching the catalogs and placing an item on hold: