Interdisciplinary Questions

Some of more interesting questions at Woodward come from students who are writing essays for mandatory English courses. Often these are referrals from Koerner because they are to do with medical topics. The focus is generally non-technical, as they're writing for a general audience, although they need to use articles from refereed journals. Recently, I had a student looking for articles on the psychological effects of second-hand smoke. This sounded relatively straightforward, but most of the articles we found in PsycInfo were about the psychological effects of quitting smoking and PubMed returned articles about the physiological effects of second-hand smoke.

Google Scholar was most useful this search (as it often is in these cases) and after some digging we found a study done in the UK where they used a Likert scale to evaluate the feelings of study participants who were exposed to side-stream smoke.