Reference at Newman Library

We’re getting that question again from SPS students who need to find articles on interpersonal spacing. From what I can tell, the students are required to find research articles on interpersonal spacing that were published in the past ten years. Going to PsycINFO and just searching “interpersonal spacing” doesn’t get you far enough, apparently. Instead, recommend to students that they set up the search this way:

Search box 1: type “personal space” and select “SU Subjects” from the search option

Search box 2: type “interpersonal” but leave search option to default setting of “Select a field (optional)”

Here’s a screenshot of the search boxes:

The trick is not to fall into the trap of assuming that “interpersonal spacing” is the best search. “Personal space” is the subject descriptor that gets used for all the articles that do happen to have “interpersonal spacing.” In the thesaurus, the scope note for “personal space” says the term is defined as “Minimal spatial distance preferred by an individual in his/her relations with others.”

By adding “interpersonal” as an additional search word, the results are a bit more focused on the concept of “interpersonal spacing” than if you just found all the articles that have the “personal space” subject descriptor.

After you run the search, change the sort option from “Relevance” to “Date Newest”