Research Methodology in Medical and Biological Sciences - Coursework Example

Research Introduction Research in today’s world is as important as eating, drinking or surviving. It is vital because the world has gone so advance that now we all need to keep running with the same pace to achieve greater heights in life. Research is all about finding out the unknown, looking for facts and discovering more about the world around oneself. Medical research is indeed the most important kind of research since it involves knowing more about the health and well being of living things be they humans, plants or animals (Laake, 2007). It involves knowing more about what suits the ecosystem and what destroys it. Medical research can be of two types. It either involves the evaluation, analysis and informed critique on the new treatments employed or it leads to the development of new treatments. The first kind of research is known as a clinical trial and is aimed at ensuring safety and efficacy of the treatments in practice. The latter is called preclinical research and is extremely important since it aims at extending existing knowledge and developing novel therapeutic techniques. An amalgam of both techniques may also be applied which leads to the evaluation of existing medical practices and finding out what new techniques can be employed to make the medical system more effective (Hulley, 2006). The reliability, validity and trustworthiness of the evidence collected are of utmost importance to any research that is conducted. Reliability means the source of information can be traced out and trusted, the research does not talk about some very absurd, unknown, out of the world hypothesis and the researcher is sufficiently skilled and trained for the kind of research that he conducts. Validity of research often refers to the amount of accurate information that is collected and the recent statistics that it uses. If a research is based on evidence collected two decades ago, it might not be as useful and in fact valid as a research that uses the last five years for its evidence collection. The evidence must be trustworthy, the readers or evaluators must not feel that the evidence is flawed or the sample taken for evidence was biased. Key issues surrounding Reliability, Validity, and Trustworthiness as applied to Evidence Based Practice Since medical research pertains to living things, it cannot be taken lightly. The researchers need to ensure that the treatment they propose is in the best interest of the patient and has minimal side effects. Also, they need to make sure that the illness they cater to is of relevance in today’s world. For example, breast cancer today affects two out of every five women in the world. It is of grave importance to find techniques that would detect it at an early stage and cure it too. Evidence based practice is the kind of medical research where the hypothesis is not just tested in the light of existing theory but is also experimentally evaluated. Researchers use random samples of affected people to test their research. Conclusions are derived from the result of those experiments and then the experiments are repeated on a different sample to get similar conclusions. The process is repeated until a trustworthy result is obtained in the light of evidence that has been collected through theory and experimentation both. However, it is not as simple to have a research that is reliable, valid and trustworthy. Collecting evidence is sometimes difficult. This is because not many people are willing to be tested upon for a novel hypothesis. The sample collected is thus limited. Also, since researchers concentrate more on theory, they tend to collect the sample or evidence from one particular area. The sample thus is very likely to be biased and not represent the whole community effectively (Sedqwick, 2010). Moreover, the nature of the research may be such that it is not feasible to collect accurate data as evidence. All of the aforementioned factors greatly hamper evidence based practice. The article named “Effectiveness of nurse delivered endoscopy: findings from randomized multi-institution nurse endoscopy trial (MINuET)” published in British Medical Journal (BMJ) in 2009 tells how an evidence based research was conducted to find out whether endoscopy results by doctors or nurses were more preferred by the patients. Surprisingly, the research concluded that the patients were happier and more satisfied when they received their endoscopy results from nurses. The researchers mention that only around 60% of their randomized sample of patients agreed on using their data for research. Also since the symptoms of the disease were taken before the diagnosis, the researchers had no direct access to it. They could see if the patients were happy with their results or not but they could not know what they were trying to cure. Unavailability of complete and accurate knowledge is thus a huge setback. To cater to this, the researchers made the patients fill some questionnaires regarding their gastrointestinal well being to judge what may have been their reason for endoscopy. However, this method suggests lack of validity and perfection and may lead to less trustworthy results. For reliability, the researchers used the approach of testing and retesting the results to ensure that there weren’t any misreading, human errors or other discrepancies (Williams, 2009). The article “Understanding resolution of deliberate self harm: qualitative interview study of patients experiences” published in the 2005 issue of BMJ also targets at evaluating the efficacy of an evidence based practice. This article is based on evaluating the consequences of deliberate self harm on patients who have been doing such wrongs in the past. It shows that such patients harmed themselves either because they were too upset, disturbed, depressed or in lack of self control. Adolescents did so mostly because of uncertain familial relationships. The research concludes that deliberate self harm may be used as a strategy to treat such patients more specifically for depression or alcohol misuse. It however says that any such practice would not be very useful for adolescents. Since this research was based on a very controversial and personal topic, recognizing why one was forced towards self harm, not many people agreed to be tested upon. The researchers could only collect responses from twenty people. This makes the research a bit difficult to trust since the sample is very likely to be biased and not represent everyone who resorts to self harm. Also, the nature of the research is such that the patients under study could not be pushed to self harm repeatedly so the researchers could not try again for more reliable results. The transferability of the results is also doubted since self harm can be a result of many things. There are limitless sorrows and problems that people face and so the results do not identify all the probable causes and so lacks the object of completeness (Sinclair, 2005). On the brighter side, both the researches, the one on endoscopy results and the one on deliberate self harm, use both qualitative and quantitative data to support the evidence collected. This adds to the trustworthiness of evidence based research. Both articles use theory and information from the past using reliable, well cited sources helping the research to gain validity and reliability. The two articles were quite reliable, valid and trustworthy since they were both well referenced. They did not just depend on information that the researchers carried out but also took information from other books and journals written earlier and extended to known and established fact. The two articles also use both qualitative and quantitative data to verify what is being conveyed. Moreover, the use of graphs and pie charts add greatly to the comprehension and validity of the articles. Despite having the problem of retesting in the article that mentions the consequences of self harm, the researchers use information from the past years in addition to the experimentation they conducted to add to the reliability. The other article on the endoscopy results however uses retesting for reliable results. The content validity has been given through proper referencing and using comments and research by well known doctors in both articles. The face validity of the two articles is pretty strong too, this is because it looks like they will deliver the message or the research outcome that the articles are intended to deliver. This is because both the articles are presented in a very organized fashion with detailed subheadings. The criterion validity of the articles can be measured seeing the number of variables that the two articles take into account. The article on the satisfaction of endoscopy results by nurses keeps the satisfaction of patients as the only variable while the article on self harm keeps the consequences and severity of self harm as the variables. This shows that the two articles are very valid and strong. This is because most of the components in the articles are fixed; just the ones that need to be measure are allowed to vary under controlled circumstances. However the two articles lack on construct validity. This is because no strong inferences can be deduced from the results. The results of the articles are pretty straightforward and indisputable. No new judgments or inferences can be derived from those. As discussed earlier the two articles use credibility of known books and authors, qualitative and quantitative data to gain trustworthiness in research. Conclusion Since millions of lives depend on it, medical research needs to be very accurate and valid. The researchers must ensure that the evidence they collect is valid and reliable. Testing and retesting a hypothesis only adds to its reliability but there may be cost and time restraints that are needed to be kept in mind (Machin, 2005). Other than that, the researchers must ensure that the research is based on the most up to date statistics and data. Without that, the research stands void in current time. Often there are sample restrictions and other financial barriers or maybe the nature of the research itself that hinders the reliability, validity and trustworthiness of the research. In such a scenario, the researchers must submit to the best available option. Also since evidence based practice requires testing and retesting, it may be a tedious job. Research is not a result of a night long endeavor, it in fact requires years for researchers to come up with a valid research (Altman, 2005). From the articles published in BMJ, it can be concluded that no matter how challenging a medical based research may be, the outcome can be reliable even when the researchers choose to let go of one of the factors from reliability, validity and trustworthiness. Sometimes, it is not all in the hands of the researchers and that is where medicinal limits plunge in. Unfortunately, little can be done to add more value to such research. The public generally needs to forgo one factor for another and contend themselves with the results. References Websites: Sinclair, J. (2005). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC557888/. BMJ Publishing Group. Williams, J. et all. (2009). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2643440/. BMJ Publishing Group. Books: Laake, P. & Benestad, H. & Olsen, B. (2007). Research Methodology in Medical and Biological Sciences. Academic Press. Hulley, S. et all. (2006). Designing Clinical Research. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Machin, D. & Campbell, M. (2005). The Design of Studies on Medical Research. Wiley. Altman, D. (2005). Practical Statistics for Medical Research. Chapman and Hall. Sedqwick, P. (2010). Making sense of Evidence based Medicine: A guide to Medical Research Literature. Hodder Arnold. Armitage, P. & Berry, G. & Mathews, J. (2001). Statistical Methods in Medical Research. Wiley-Blackwell. Read More