Single Subject Design for School Psychology and Special Education

When you use a database to search for articles on your topic, the database search engine is looking for the appearance of your keywords (or search terms) in the title, summary (abstract), added notes, and full text (if available) of each article in the database. It is important to do some brainstorming for good keywords that describe your topic.  Start with the keywords that first come to mind, and then add synonyms or related keywords to broaden your search and increase relevant results.

Boolean searching is a great way to limit, widen and/or redefine your search. Therefore, it’s a great search method for complex research topics. AND/OR/NOT are known as Boolean operators and they’re used to define the relationship between your search terms. You can either type these terms into the search box (they do not have to be capitalized) or use the drop down menus in the database between the search boxes to select the operators you want to use. Remember that AND will narrow your results, OR will expand your results, and NOT will exclude terms from your results.

For example, single subject design is also known as single case, single system, or single participant design, so you will want to use these 4 terms when you search. Use the boolean operator OR when adding these 4 terms to your search- it will expand your results because it will search for articles containing any of the 4 terms. If you use AND (another operator) to connect these words, it will narrow your results significantly because it will only search for articles that contain all 4 terms, which is unlikely. 

Let's say you are interested in studies which used single subject design to explore interventions for autism. Our search might look like this: single subject design OR single case design OR single-subject design OR single-case design AND autism AND intervention

Try searching for articles that include single subject design in the education and psychology databases listed below, and see what you can find!