An Intervention Program to Promote Health-Related Physical Fitness in Nurses - Essay Example

"An Intervention Program to Promote Health-Related Physical Fitness in Nurses" is a perfect example of a paper on care.
While the aim of the study was to attribute changes in physical fitness of the nurses as a result of the intervention, and internal validity problem may emerge if there is a third variable, which is responsible for the changes in the health-related physical fitness such as nutrition; which the research has not put into the account (Yuan et al. 4).   To control this problem, the researcher must identify possible confounding variables before conducting the study and then exercise appropriate control measures to ensure that all the groups that are tested exhibit similar characteristics. Ideally, if the type of nutrition that the participants are taking is a possible confounding variable, the researcher will want to ensure that all the participants take similar nutrition throughout the study period. This remedy will affect the external validity in that the extent to which the results can be generalized across environments where people feed on different nutrition will be limited (Houser 299).

Maturation:

This study will take three months to complete. During this time, so many changes may occur in the lives of the participants, which may introduce alternative explanations. Some of these changes include acquiring new knowledge, physical growth, and fatigue. Therefore, due to these changes, the way a subject reacts to the independent variable may vary significantly.  This problem makes it hard for the researcher to establish whether the cause of the changes is due to the above-mentioned developments or the independent variable. The researcher to make sure that maturation between experimental and control groups is on the same level, to avoid this threat to internal validity. By trying to use homogenous groups in the study, increase the probability of making a Type I or Type II error, which affects the validity of the statistical conclusions; for example by reducing the statistical significance (Houser 297).

The instruments used to measure changes in physical fitness can change from time to time. This could also happen as a result of the researcher changing the criteria used to evaluate changes in physical fitness. If changes occur in any of the instrumentation, alternative explanations are readily available and hence the internal validity of the conclusion is affected. To mitigate this problem, the researcher has applied retrospective pretesting. In this method, the researcher has used pre-and post-intervention in the intervention group (Yuan et al. 4).  However, a generalization of these measures to the concept of the intervention puts the question of construct validity, as it might become hard for the researcher to connect these measures to what is really being examined (Houser 297).

The dangers of failing to consider the validity of a research study

If a nurse fails to consider the validity of a research study that involves developing evidence-based practice, then several dangers are likely to be experienced. Most importantly, the nurse might result in conducting a study whereby the assessment, measurement process of the project does not really measure what was originally intended to be measured. For example, if the nurse was intending to measure the effect of physical fitness on the health of fitness of patients, they might apply measurement tools and assessment intervention that do not relate to improvement in the health of the patients in question.  If the researcher does not consider the internal validity, then the external validity is also disregarded henceforth, and hence the results of such a poorly designed study cannot be applied in the sample or even the population of that study (Barry 267).