QUESTION 2
According to the Joanna Briggs Institute, what level of evidence would you ascribe to:
a) a randomised controlled trial
b) a cohort study
QUESTION 5
You purchase batteries for your kitchen clock. The batteries have a mean life of 820 hours, with a standard deviation of 30 hours.
a) The batteries run out after 715 hours. Would you be entitled to a refund? Why?
b) What if the battery died after 780 hours?
QUESTION 3
James works in a paediatric surgical ward, where the majority of children are admitted for elective surgery. He is concerned about the level of
distress and anxiety children display on admission and the nursing staff, in conjunction with the Play Therapy department and child psychologists,
develop a package to prepare pre-school children for their hospital experience. James wants to know whether this package will have an effect on
children’s distress.
a) Generate a null hypothesis and an alternate (non-directional) hypothesis for James’s question
i) Null:
ii)Alternate:
b) What would be the ideal research design to answer this question? Give reasons.
c) What other design(s) could be used? Why might these be chosen in preference to the one identified above?
d) Identify the main ethical issue for this study.
James and his team carry out the study. They choose an objective measure of children’s distress – salivary cortisol, measured in mcg/dl and expected
to be normally distributed.
e) Identify :
i) the independent variable
ii) the dependent variable
f) What measurement will the researchers use to examine the effectiveness of the package?
g) What statistical test would be appropriate to test the hypothesis?
h) The test is performed and the result generated is p=0.03. Interpret the p-value.
i) What decision would you expect the researchers to make with respect to the null hypothesis ?
QUESTION 4
Nurses in an aged care facility are concerned about the incidence of urinary tract infections (UTI) among residents. They wonder whether drinking
cranberry juice daily will reduce the number of infections and plan a study to find out. They enrol 240 residents, 120 in each arm. At the end of
the study they find that 22 residents who receive cranberry juice develop a UTI, compared with 31 in those who do not.
a) What would be the appropriate statistical test to determine whether this difference is significant?
From the figures we can see that the incidence of UTI in those receiving cranberry juice is 7.5% lower than in those not receiving it (this is
called the Absolute Risk Reduction or ARR). The researchers calculate that the 95% confidence intervals around this number are -2.95 and 17.95.
b) Interpret the confidence intervals
d) What conclusion will the researchers make regarding the null hypothesis?
QUESTION 5
This question uses the Excel file in the Week 9 activities on Moodle.
a) How would you examine the relationship between the participants’ ages and the total attitude score?
b) Carry out the test you identified in part (a). [Hint: find it in the tab Formulas ?More functions?Statistical]. Record the statistic generated by
the calculation.
c) What can you conclude about the relationship between age and score?
QUESTION 6
Sarah is a Nurse Unit Manager in a busy Emergency Department. Her department has experienced an increase in workplace violence in recent months and
she is concerned about its effect on the nursing staff. She decides to do some research on this topic using a qualitative approach, with a
particular focus on nurses’ experiences of workplace violence and their individual coping strategies.
a) Identify an appropriate methodology for this study and provide a rationale for its use.
b) Identify and provide the rationale for a suitable sampling strategy.
c) What data collection strategy/strategies would be most appropriate for this methodology? Give reasons.
d) What would be an appropriate method of data analysis for this methodology? Give reasons.
e) With reference to the principles of ethical conduct of research, identify the potential ethical problems with this study. How could Sally
overcome these?
f) Identify three (3) elements of trustworthiness and provide a specific example of how each could be achieved in this study.
QUESTION 10
In the appendix at the end of this document you will find extracts from interview transcripts from a study examining the experiences of lecturers at
a UK university. “Susan” and “Fern” are pseudonyms for two of the study participants. The specific question addressed in these extracts is “What are
lecturers’ experiences of teaching various types of students?”
a) Comment on the type and content of the questions asked by the interviewer to the two participants.
b) What data is missing from these transcripts? [Hint: think about type of data as well as actual information] As a researcher, how would you
rectify this?
c) From the data, identify 2 themes that could contribute to answering the research question. Provide 3 examples of data that would contribute to
each theme.
QUESTION 7
a) Provide an example of each of the following :
i) a type of research study that would require written informed consent from the participants
ii) a type of study that would not require written consent
b) Explain why these types of studies have different requirements.
c) Provide an example of each of the following categories, and give reasons why the type of study would be categorised in this way:
i) a type of study requiring approval by a full meeting of a Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC)
ii) a type of study that an HREC would classify as ‘low risk’
iii) a type of study that would not require ethics approval
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