I am improving on my internet search documentation processes at the same time as reading articles.

I decided to study some literature references for a grant proposal that our self help group submitted to a foundation. We won the grant along with our hospital partner. I believe it was really the hospital that submitted the grant proposal. Our executive officer sent board members the project proposal files and I opened and read the lietrature reference pages. I then searched out a few articles at the school library. I started to read one article this morning.

The first open member/public meeting for our project is an info meeting tomorrow and today I have started to read one of the references/articles about a psychological scale that measures hope.

I did this search on google for the phrase “dispositional approach to measures” after reading Snyder, C.R., Sympson, S.C., Ybasco, F.C., Borders, T.F., Babyak, M.A., & Higgins, R., L. (1996). “Development and validation of the State Hope Scale.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2, 321-335. They use this phrase at 321 para 3 to describe part of their method. I needed to learn what is meant by dispositional.

I learned dispositional means inner person. In fact dispositional is like the word “traits” and is the view that includes internal personality characteristics, and further, is about internal reality or thought processes thus part of the “self”. Clique for understanding from my own language would be: “One's position on the matter”; One's disposition"; or legallly speaking "One's disposition submitted to the court. Differs from supposition and opposition.

The top three search results point to the same journal as the search term was taken from. Other search results show that making scales for stress, and satisfaction( in employment) and ability to think about symbols are all approached from dispositional approaches. Also the search got confused by the word "approach" being used as a trait, in the measure, rather than a methodological term which was the original context. But even approach/avoidance can be looked at from a dispositional perspective. The original context used approach to describe the method of constructing the Hope scale.

The learning I got out of this was less about psychiatry and more about how to document a google search. I copied and pasted the top ten search results into a word doc using Neo Office. I then followed 9 of the links that were dot edu links or I also followed one dot net link that was a researcher's web site; the only dot com I looked at was the Wiley.com web link because Wiley are an academic publisher so should be good quality.

After visiting each link I copied and pasted descriptions and tables of contents, or I copied and pasted bibliographic cites, or downloaded pdf's and also book marked each link's web page. I did not actually copy any articles off the web in whole and the pdf's seemed to offered freely. Only one article now needs a further search at the school library but in the end I now understand what the original article was talking about in the 3rd paragraph and this was a methodological aspect to this paper, so was important from my prespective. I then made notes on what I did for the nine web pages or documents.