Exercise 1

Information Competence

Introduction

State Your Topic as a Question

Identify Concepts

Narrow or Broaden Your Topic

Exercise

Defining Your Research Topic - Exercise

You are asked to write a paper on out-of-home child care, commonly known as day care.

1. Formulate two or three questions on the topic of day care.

2. Choose one of your questions and pick out two or three significant words.

3. Now list synonyms and related concepts for the topic of day care. You may want to read the paragraphs below for possible terms.

Day care can loosely be defined as an arrangement to supplement care of children by their parents, usually, but not always, outside of the home. While informal child care arrangements have always been with us, day care centers as we know them first appeared in France in the mid-nineteenth century. Arguments in favor of day care usually include economic necessity, availability of specialized services or settings, and the natural preference of most children to spend time with other children. Arguments against day care fall in a number of areas, depending on whether the care is home-based or center-based. These issues usually involve the primacy of parental responsibility for child-rearing, the cost of such care, and the increased frequency of illnesses among children in group care.

While much research has been done on the effects of child care, the results have not been able to illustrate a consistent pattern of effects. There are many reasons why this is so, including the difficulty of comparing groups of children and the wide range of quality measures used to rate child care settings. Most studies choose to focus on cognitive, social, and emotional development of children.

List day care related terms below (separate terms with commas):

4. Which of the following article titles contain the synonyms and related terms you listed above?

	Children's Defense Fund. (1996). The state of America's children. Washington, DC: Author.
	Dombro, A. (1997). Community mobilization strategies to support young children and their families. New York: Families and Work Institute.
	Galinsky, E. (1998, November), The day care debate. Parents Magazine, p.45-48.
	Getting the best child care--other than Mom. (1985, October 21). U.S. News & World Report, pp.70-71.
	Goodwin, W.L. and Goodwin, L.D. (1996). Understanding quantitative and qualitative research in early childhood. New York: Teachers College Press.
	Greene, J.C. (1997). Advancing mixed-method evaluation. Emerging strategies in evaluating child and family services, 3, 2-3.
	Kagan, S.L. (1995). By the bucket: Achieving results for young children. Washington, D.C.: National Governors' Association.
	Kagan, S.L. (1997). Considering child-based results for young children: Definitions, desirability, feasibility, and next steps. New Haven, CT: Yale Bush Center on Child Development and Social Policy.

5. Look at the questions you formulated earlier. Now try to create more focused or narrower questions by using some of the additional terms from the list you created. You may also want to look at the above paragraphs again to get some ideas.

Original Questions:

Revised / Narrower Questions: