Research Methods in Nursing - Essay Example

"Research Methods in Nursing" is an outstanding example of a paper on care.
Research methods in nursing can be categorized into two groups, which are quantitative methods and qualitative methods. These methods can be used alone or in combination to elicit required data to answer a given research question and test hypotheses. An example of a quantitative study is Health Care Workers’ hand Decontamination Practices, which was set out to observe the compliance of health workers with guidelines for health hygiene when caring for patients in an Irish care unit (Creedon, 2006). It also set out to investigate the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes of the nursing staff in relation to their compliance with guidelines into hand hygiene before and after the implementation of a program for multi-faceted hand hygiene. Results showed an increased shift in the nurse’s compliance with guidelines after the implementation of their program, while their knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes also changed significantly (Creedon, 2006).

The research study can be qualified as a quantitative study for various reasons. First, it measures the incidence of various practices in this case washing hands for a chosen sample. It also has a large number of participants, seventy-five in this case, who have been randomly selected (Creedon, 2006). In addition, the data was collected using structured questionnaires and the data was analyzed using by cross-tabulation using Mann-Whitney and chi-square statistical tests, while its findings were descriptive and conclusive in nature, showing compliance rates for nursing staff. Finally, the results were also used to make recommendations, such as the increased education of nursing staff regarding hand hygiene (Creedon, 2006). This study was selected because it relates to a pertinent issue in nursing care, especially with regards to preventing hospital acquired infections, which are now increasingly not covered by Medicare.

            An example of a qualitative study is “A Multicenter Qualitative Study on Preventing Hospital-Acquired Urinary Tract Infection in US Hospitals”. The study seeks to investigate the manner in which hospitals in the United States approach the prevention of urinary tract infections acquired in the hospitals (Creedon et al, 2008). There are various qualifications for why this is a qualitative study, apart from the fact that the topic describes it as being so. First, the study is set out to understand underlying reasons for the research problem, while also providing insights into CAUTI problem settings and generating a hypothesis to be researched on late using quantitative means. In addition, it also seeks to uncover prevalent opinion trends on CAUTIs. It also has a smaller number of cases that are non-representative, while the participants were selected in order to fulfill a preset quota (Creedon et al, 2008).

Secondly, the research study uses semi-structured telephone interviews to collect the data required to address the hypothesis. Thirdly, the research study did not utilize statistical modes of data analysis (Creedon et al, 2008). Finally, the research study was investigative with the findings not being conclusive or usable to come up with generalizations concerning the population that it was interested in. In this case, the findings referred to the importance nursing staff attached to early removal of catheters, the benefits of CAUTI intervention practices, and the impact of external forces on the surveillance of UTIs and practices for the prevention of infection (Creedon et al, 2008). These findings, like in all qualitative studies, only develop initial comprehension of the issue and provide a sound base for decision making in the future on how to prevent CAUTIs. This research study was chosen because it investigates what is the most common infections acquired in hospitals.