Library Research Module

1) I didn't know where to start with women who theorize on my topic, so I went straight into database searches for keywords. I began with simply "women business" and yielded thousands of results. Here are bullet pointed ways I used the subject topics to yield hyperlinked keywords. Each dropped bullet represents a subtopic of a subtopic, or in the case of the commas, multiple subtopics.

• women owned business enterprises
• federal aide to women owned business operations
• government accountability, government lending
• business education
• career development
• economic aspects
• economic conditions
• finance

Next, I got more specific, querying "women small business," and yielded only "women executives" as a relevant subtopic. The following results are similar, with the arrow indicating "yield," or rather, another subtopic.

• Women capitalism → patriarchy → government policy
• Women leadership → women executives
• Women labor → Sexual division of labor → businesswomen, pay equity, sex roles in the work environment, international business enterprises, feminist economics

2) I began with this question in the journal databases, starting in the business college, with a specific emphasis in business, and went to the LexisNexis Statistical Insight Journal and searched "women business." It was a goldmine. I found a research study based on statistics collected from the Survey of Small Business Finances entitled "Gender and the Availability of Credit to Privately Held Firms: Evidence from the Surveys of Small Business Finances." It's purely quantitative research that posits exactly in the direction I wanted to take my research, but stresses specifically that women are not barred from obtaining credit, but rather discouraged from applying in the first place and charged greater interest rates, despite being more likely to be required to offer collateral. It also examines the general intersectional differences in identity that differ between male and female small business owners, with an emphasis on the education gap, which favors men. The abstract was basically the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Anyway, more on LexisNexis: I also found a research document entitled "Equality for Women: Where Do We Stand on Millenium Development Goal 3?" This is further qualitative research that I've yet to review, but am excited to delve into, though it represents women on a global scale and isn't particular to just business ownership, so I'm unsure of its direct application.

Cole, Rebel A., and Hamid Mehran. "Gender and the Availability of Credit to Privately Held Firms:   Evidence from the Surveys of Small Business Finances." LexisNexis Statistical. Web. 9 Sept. 2010.

Buvinic, Mayra, Andrew R. Morrison, A. Waafas Ofosu-Amaah, and Mirja Sjöblom, eds. "Equality for            Women: Where Do We Stand on Millenium Development Goal 3?" LexisNexis Statistical. Web. 9 Sept.  2010.

Next, I became curious about the sociological implications of my topic, so I searched the sociology journal databases and checked out Contemporary Women's Issues. A lot of these results were in the form of extremely brief newsletters, outlining general statistics, such as how women-owned businesses are on the rise, with the most quickly growing examples listed (related fact: the top five metro areas are all cities in Florida). Additionally, I read a newsletter entitled "Women business owners rank concerns" and to my surprise, it speaks only of financial issues on a macro scale, not an individual basis. However, while these are statistically based, it's in the form of surveys, rather than analysis of preexisting data. This distinction was quite surprising to me, and even more than that, I found quite a few articles about finance as it exists in other countries, as analyzed by their own citizens or American researchers. Most of the LexisNexis information is compiled either by the US government or in the case of the principal article mentioned above, the Federal Reserve Bank. 


Basically, my greatest surprise was that even in sociological research, the truncated reports produced completely lacked voice, and instead reported blankly on statistics. I have yet to find a VOICE for what I'm trying to research and write about, and given my previous background and area of study, this is quite disconcerting. However, after further research, I realized that the brevity and lack of commentary is not isolated to sociology, as the Worldwide Political Science Abstracts database offered much more substantial articles, though the only one that related to my research was part of a dissertation compilation that I'm not sure we have any volumes of dating past 1980 entitled "Government contracts: A study of minority small business owners' and administrators' strategies for success," published this year. Furthermore, these journals are pointing me in a new direction; perhaps an analysis of microcredit in developing nations would be more valuable? At this point, I'm so deep in the research that I am only posing this because I am discouraged by the lack of readily accessible commentary on this issue in the domestic sphere, although perhaps searching for it will yield more original commentary? In an effort to narrow it to the domestic, I even tried "women business America" as a search term on the CWI database, and yielded zero results.


Anyway, I'm getting distracted. On to WorldCat. For whatever reason, the principal search results for articles utilizing the search terms "women" and "business" were all in Slovenian. There were five thousand+ internet resources under these search terms, and I looked at pages upon pages and didn't find any that were relevant without narrowing it down further than I had to using the topic specific databases. However, when narrowed to "women," "business," and "government loans," I yielded similar results to my LexisNexis results, including two early nineties sources from the U.S. Small Business Administration, concerning "the facts about women-owned small businesses." This overlap is not something I saw in the sociology database.


3) As I mentioned before, the sociological sources were primarily newsletters, and as such, were not very informative beyond unimpressive statistics, or could have been quite informative, in the case of the aforementioned dissertation, but were out of my immediately available reach. My preference for this research has become research journals and dissertations, but more than that, I need to find where solid, interesting theorizations begin, with a seminal scholar in the field, which will happen after I get in touch with professors more directly related to my field of interest. However, business itself is obviously quantitative and generally not based in theory, and other than Marxist feminism and labor issues, I struggle to find where women's studies would intersect. If anything, the initial research process has only made me unsure of the viability of my topic as it stands and I am seriously considering another financially motivated topic. As for comparison, the level of detail included in the sociology database I referred to was, in a word, inadequate, though I'm very excited to go back to the library on Monday to look into that Political Science dissertation abstract further. For initial data, it seems that my best bet is the statistics compiled by the government in research reports on LexisNexis. Basically, I've researched for well over nine hours of active time and I have yielded very little, so I'd love help redirecting myself because honestly, the inadequacy of my results does not reflect a lack of effort.