T/F : some journals have restrictions (ex: formatting / page limit) that may make sore research hard to read
True
What part of an article is a brief description of the study and should be used to help filter articles?
the abstract
Research studies generally follow the IMRAD format, what are the components of this?
- intro
- methods
- results
- discussion
What part of the article identifies the central concepts/phenomena, variables, purpose, question, hypothesis, theoretical or conceptual frame work and possibly a literature review
- introduction : what is being studied, what is expected, what does previous literature suggest, why is the study necessary
What is included in the methods section?
- research design : may use more than one
- sampling plan : who was chosen for study and relevant info
- measuring variables and data collection : what data, what they are using to collect the data, and how often
- study procedures : describe the details of the study (ie time frame)
- data analysis : how the data will be analyzed
Why is statistical significance important?
What value is considered significant?
Are descriptive statistics reliable?
- statical significance represents the likelihood of the results being replicated in a new sample
- significant = p less than or equal to 0.05
- descriptive spastics are not reliable
What are identified in the results section of a qualitative study?
- themes or categories
In what part of a research article are the interpretation of results, clinical and research implications, and study limitations and ramifications for the believability of the results located?
- the discussion section
The assessment of what 3 things determines the quality or merit of a scientific study?
- reliability
- validity
- trustworthiness
What is reliability?
- the accuracy and consistency of information obtained from a study
- if the tool used to collect the data was reliable it will produce similar results under the same circumstances
What is validity?
- determine if the methods are appropriate to study the outcome
- if the intervention is truly correlated to the result - impact of extraneous factors
If a researcher wanted to study pulmonary status which would be more valid, evaluation of RR or O2 sat?
- O2 sat b/c RR can be affected by many other factors (stress pain etc)
What is trustworthiness?
- qualitative studies
- credibility, transferability, confirmability, dependability, and authenticity
- triangulation is the primary method to assess this
What is bias?
a distortion or influence the results in error of inference / conclusion drawn from the study
How is biased reduced in qualitative studies?
- triangulation
- reflexivity : reflect critically on self and keep personal values in check
- use multiple methods to collect data
How is biased reduced in quantitative studies?
- randomness : assigning indv to the intervention by chance
- blind : the participant do not know if they received the intervention
- double blind : the participants and the researchers do not know who received the intervention
What are cofounding variables?
How do researcher account for cofounding variables?
- extraneous variables that could influence the outcome
- should discuss variables and try to keep them constant –> not necessarily everything the same but that there is enough randomness that it will lessen the effects seen in the outcome
What type of study is considered generalizable?
- quantitative that is valid reliable and unbiased
What type of study is transferable?
non-biased qualitative study
