Critical appraisal of a research paper: persistant back pain - why do physical therapy clinicians continue treatment A mixed method study of chiropractors osteopaths and physiotherapist - Outline Example

Download file to see previous pages These responses meant that the study used both qualitative and quantitative data, making it a mixed-method study, the benefits and negatives to this being discussed below. The purpose of this essay is to fully explore and critically examine the work by Pincus et al (2006) and the way that they have approached the topic of persistent back pain and treatment. In doing so, it will become clear how this type of research functions within the wider scope of physiotherapy, and how the practical nature of the field influences research literature, as well as how the literature can be used in practical applications.
The methodology of the Pincus et al (2006) study is fairly simple, and comprises of two major elements. The first element is the questionnaire response which gives quantitative data. 354 participants responded to the questionnaire, which was delivered to a total of 600 people; 200 from each field of chiropractic, osteopathy and physiotherapy. Evidently, this is quite a large group of participants which means that there is less likely to be any participant bias, which can so often be found amongst smaller groupings. Another major strength here is that the study approached equal amounts of individuals from each relevant field, again meaning that the responses are less likely to hold any bias. In total 122 chiropractors, 120 osteopaths and 105 physiotherapists responded, all similar in number, again reducing the likelihood of bias (Ellis, 2010). However, there are issues. One of the major issues with allowing respondents to participate at their leisure is that there may be a certain type of person that is more likely to respond, therefore skewing the responses to this type of individual.
The use of a questionnaire to garner quantitative information is common, and has some positives and negatives. The first positive benefit is that a questionnaire is cheap to distribute and fairly simple to analyze (Munn et al, 1999), ...Download file to see next pagesRead More