why is EBP important to health professionals?
- accountability
- professional standards
- clinical competence and safety
- to improve practice and service
- apply research to the real world of work
- development of clinical protocols and policies
Resources for evidence based practice include?
- clinical guidelines
- systematic reviews and meta-analyses
- other reviews of the research literature
- published research reports
Components of research reports include?
- Title
- abstract
- introduction/literature review
- methods
- results
- discussion
- conclusions
- references
define qualitative research
- provides a complete picture of phenomena of interest
- trustworthiness/rigor have specific meaning (build up the level of trust)
- researchers are not at arms length
- research procedures intended to yield non-numerical information (words not numbers)
List some types of qualitative methods
- descriptive exploratory
- phenomenology
- grounded theory
- ethonology
- historical
- case study
- action research
An overview of quantitative research consists of
- a partial picture of phenomena of interest
- research procedures yield numerical information
- researchers are at arms length from data collection process
- validity has specific meaning
List some types of quantitative research studies
- quasi-experimental
- experimental
- case control
- cohort
- retrospective
- cross-sectional
- longitudinal
- correlational
what is the purpose of sampling?
- to increase efficiency of study
- maintain representativeness
- minimise bias (quantitative)
- represent the characteristics of interest of target population
what is the sampling goals for qualitative research?
- to find the best source of data relevant to study aims/objectives
- obtain insights into the phenomenon
what is the sampling goals for quantitative research?
- obtain sample representative of population of interest
- obtain sample that allows effects of specified variables to be distinguished from other variables
probability sampling includes?
- simple random sampling
- stratified random sampling
- cluster sampling
- systematic sampling
qualitative data collection methods include?
- interviews
- journal entries/other written data
- observation (generally participant)
- examination of documents
- focus groups
how do we ensure trustworthiness/rigor?
by conducting members checks
- audit trails
- triangulation
quantitative data collection methods include?
- physiological/laboratory-based (experiments)
- observational
- questions and self-report scales questionnaires
- interviews
define internal validity
-refers to whether intervention (independent variable) had real measurable effect on outcome (dependant) variable
define external validity
refers to generalizability of findings to other populations and or settings.
what is the purpose of qualitative data analysis?
to create some meaning out of the data’s findings
- look for commonalities
- researchers look for themes, patterns and meaning.
How do we ensure trustworthiness?
- through credibility
- conformability
- audit trails
- members checks
list the levels of measurement
- nominal
- ordinal
- interval
- ratio
what do statistical procedures represent
give organisation and meaning to numerical data
descriptive statistics represent?
describes, organises and summarises raw data
inferential statistics represent?
allow researchers to estimate how reliability they can make predictions and generalise their findings based on the data.
the 3 most common measures of central tendency?
- mode
- median
- mean
Inferential statistics?
allow inferences or conclusions to be drawn from data.
- usually have 2 purposes:
1. estimate how well a sample statistic reflects the population parameter
2. test hypotheses or predictions about the population
