This question is frequently asked by students in our online RN-to-BSN nursing program.  Hanna Schmillen, our health sciences librarian, offers the tips below.  

Some of what you have to cover within the scope of nursing and healthcare:

• The ethnic group’s perception of communication, perception of space, perception of social organization, perception of time, and perception of environmental control.

• Finally, any biological variations of that ethnic group (for example, sickle cell anemia in African Americans or people of Mediterranean descent)

Note: You are not going to find all of this in one article/resource, most likely... You will have to search different places, in different ways, to include all of these topics. You need peer-reviewed and credible resources (articles and evidence-based books).

Places to search:

• CINAHL (Articles), PubMed (Articles), ClinicalKey (Articles and Books), AccessMedicine (Articles and Books)

Two best options of how to search: (Tip- NO FULL SENTENCES!)

1. Search for your group (i.e. Chinese) AND topic (i.e. communication) AND (perception OR culture OR tradition)

   • It will look like this: Chinese AND communication AND (perception OR culture OR tradition)

   • Do this for each topic you need to cover and you will have less results, but will have to run a search more.

2. Search more broadly for just your group and perception topic, as demonstrated above. You will have more results to look through, but you won't have to run as many searches.