East Carolina University
Department of Psychology

Searching PsycInfo

• Go to Joyner Library Electronic Resources Databases.

• Click on "P" and then locate PsycInfo. 

• Click on [description] following PsycInfo,  where there are links to help on using PsycINFO. Check them out. If you find they don’t make a whole lot of sense, do not be discouraged, they will later after you have played with the system a bit.

• Back up to the Electronic Resources page and click on PsycInfo, which will take you into the EBSCO Host Research Database. It will already be pointed to PsycInfo.

• Uncheck "Suggest Subject Terms."

• In the search field enter (without the quotation marks) “idealism” and then click the “Search” button.

    I got too many hits, 921, when I did this in July of 2006.  I need to narrow it down.

• Click the Advanced Search Tab and then search for "ethical ideology" and "idealism," like this:

    I got 17 hits this time.  That is a bit sparse, but I can get more by trying other search terms.

    Many hits will have links that allow you to load the full text of the article -- for example,

Clicking on "PDF Full Text" here loaded the full article in Acrobat Reader.   Clicking on "Add" adds this result to a folder.  After adding one or more results to a folder you can email the folder, print the folder, or save the folder to disk -- just click on "View Folder" at the top of the page.

Try searching for "idealism" and "relativism."  This will point you to articles that concern both idealism and relativism.  I found 46.

    If you carefully inspected the results you should have obtained by this time, you would notice that it is Donelson R. Forsyth (at Virginia Commonwealth University) who developed a scale, the Ethics Position Questionnaire, which can be employed to measure an individual’s ethical ideology, both idealism and relativism. It might be helpful to search for any articles he has authored. Try this:

• In the Search box, enter “Forsyth-Done*” and then, to the right,  click the arrow and select from the drop-down list “AU Author.”

• Now you will be searching for publications by anybody with the last name Forsyth and a first name that starts with “Done.”

• I found 90 publications. Dr. Forsyth has been a busy fellow.

• Conducting a Literature Search

Contact Information for the Webmaster,
Dr. Karl L. Wuensch



This page most recently revised on 14. July 2006.