Learn Research Skills

The purpose of this course is to explore how mentoring can be used to build research competence in nursing in various professional and geographic settings. Discrete projects, multiple mentor sources, and mutually beneficial peer relationships can enable mentoring across ones career. Psychosocial dimensions of mentoring support creative work. When scholarly productivity with funded research is the desired outcome, intense involvement of a protg with an expert researcher is essential.
 

1.Target your audience.

Consider a variety of sources for possible respondents. In addition to email mailing lists, for example, consider posting your survey to newsgroups and web communities.

2. Personalize your email invitations

Emails with a personal salutation result in increased response rates of at least five percent, and sometimes much higher. Send your email to "Dear Mr. Wright" rather than "Dear Valued Alumni."

3. Keep your email invitation short

Please keep your email invitation short and simple, with just one link - the one to the survey. Please be sure to explain the following: -

• Who you are and the purpose of your study
• The survey's benefit to the individual as well as to your
• Length of survey - if it is short, emphasize that. But be truthful about times - people are more likely to stick with longer surveys if they know about how much time they will take.
• Privacy statement, if required by your organization.

4. Make your first survey page simple - let people take the survey!

Once people have decided to take your survey, they will want to get started. Studies show most people don't read extensive instructions. 

This assessment tool has been developed for those unfamiliar with qualitative research and its theoretical perspectives. This tool presents a number of questions that deal very broadly with some of the principles or assumptions that characterise qualitative research.

Your slides will make or break your presentation. An effective slide deck not only makes your talk easier to follow and comprehend, but it can also boost your credibility and leave your audience with a big smile on its face.

I saw dozens of dozens of presentations last week at PubCon Las Vegas, a web marketing conference focusing on search and social media. In addition to all the amazing insights I picked up, I also learned a lot about what makes a good (and bad!) set of presentation slides.
 

In the animation below we show how risks can be ‘spun’ to look bigger or smaller, how medical treatments can be made to seem useless or to be wonder cures, and how lifestyle changes might look worthwhile or not worth bothering with. All by changing the words used, the way the numbers are expressed, and the particular graphics chosen.

In the past week or so, I have received two different continuing education unit (CEU) offers focused on critical thinking in nursing. This got me thinking (critically), "what's going on here?" So, I surfed the Internet using critical thinking as my search term, and I was overwhelmed. I found images and graphs and a You Tube video and websites and studies; clearly critical thinking is the latest trend.

For nurses, this is not a new trend. Without even being aware of it, half the time, nurses critically think their way through every day. The thinking process that guides nursing practice must be organized, purposeful and disciplined because nursing decisions often profoundly affect their patients' lives.
 

Meetings can be one of the biggest time drains for you as an individual and for a business. A meeting with 7 people all making $20 per hour costs a business $140 per hour. If it is a once-per-week meeting and there are 15 minutes wasted at each meeting, the total yearly waste comes to over $1,800. I don’t know about you, but a one hour meeting with only 15 minutes wasted is actually a pretty good meeting, in my experience. Half of a meeting being wasted is more par for the course, and entire meetings that are unproductive is fairly common.

I’ve studied probability and statistics without experiencing them. What’s the difference? What are they trying to do?

This analogy helped:

• Probability is starting with an animal, and figuring out what footprints it will make
• Statistics is seeing a footprint, and guessing the animal

Probability is straightforward: you have the bear. Measure the foot size, the leg length, and you can deduce the footprints. “Oh, Mr. Bubbles weighs 400lbs and has 3-foot legs, and will make tracks like this.” More academically: “We have a fair coin. After 10 flips, here are the possible outcomes.”

Statistics is harder. We measure the footprints and have to guess what animal it could be. A bear? A human? If we get 6 heads and 4 tails, what’re the chances of a fair coin?
 

This guide provides an overview of how statistical information can be used to make well informed policy decisions. Throughout the guide references are made to other resources, relevant training courses and associated frameworks that provide more detail.

Objective
A sound theoretical foundation to guide practice is enhanced by the ability of nurses to critique research.  This article provides a structured route to questioning the methodology of nursing research.

Primary Argument
Nurses may find critiquing a research paper a particularly daunting experience when faced with their
first paper. Knowing what questions the nurse should be asking is perhaps difficult to determine when there may be unfamiliar research terms to grasp. Nurses may benefit from a structured approach which helps them understand the sequence of the text and the subsequent value of a research paper.

This compilation is dedicated to the latest and most competent academic and scholar search engines and sources.

Website dedicated to HSR includes:

Glossary, Data sources, Ethics, Privacy, Readings, and other links.

This on-line workshop explains the basics of what administrative data are, where they come from, how they can be used for research, what the data produced for a research project actually looks like and what skills are needed to work with them. It also provides an overview of the access policy/application process at Population Data BC.

Participants will gain detailed information about: working with administrative data, associated opportunities and challenges, and the resources available to help them understand and analyze the data.

Audience: Workshop content is designed for graduate students, investigators and research analysts who are currently using, or would like to use, administrative data for their research.

Free

Comparative effectiveness research is designed to inform health-care decisions by providing evidence on the effectiveness, benefits, and harms of different treatment options. The evidence is generated from research studies that compare drugs, medical devices, tests, surgeries, or ways to deliver health care.

There are two ways that this evidence is found:

• Researchers look at all of the available evidence about the benefits and harms of each choice for different groups of people from existing clinical trials, clinical studies, and other research. These are called research reviews, because they are systematic reviews of existing evidence.
• Researchers conduct studies that generate new evidence of effectiveness or comparative effectiveness of a test, treatment, procedure, or health-care service.
   

The EHC Program Slide Library

This collection of 27 presentations was developed for instructors needing materials to teach clinical researchers and students about the science of systematic reviews, or for EPC directors to use in mentoring and teaching new investigators to the team. The presentations and quizzes are based on the Methods Guide for Effectiveness and Comparative Effectiveness Reviews and other resources.
 

This collection of articles is from the Arizona State University College of Nursing and Health Innovation's Center for the Advancement of Evidence-Based Practice. Evidence-based practice (EBP) is a problem-solving approach to the delivery of health care that integrates the best evidence from studies and patient care data with clinician expertise and patient preferences and values. When delivered in a context of caring and in a supportive organizational culture, the highest quality of care and best patient outcomes can be achieved. The purpose of this series is to give nurses the knowledge and skills they need to implement EBP consistently, one step at a time.

This series has received the Nursing Media Award for Print from Sigma Theta Tau International Awards for Nursing Excellence.

This background paper defines and summarizes the concept of Evidence-Informed Public Health
(EIPH) recognizing that, to use evidence in public health practice and policy development, one must
first critically appraise the available research that provides the basis for that evidence. This paper addresses the need for critical appraisal of primary research studies and systematic reviews to inform effective public health practice. It also outlines a hierarchy of quality of research evidence that can be used to inform public health policy and program delivery. For that reason, this paper presents some of the more commonly used critical appraisal tools. These tools provide basic guidelines and checklists for public health professionals to evaluate the quality of research when reading the literature. Web links in the compendium that accompanies this paper will direct users to some of the most current and usable tools.

The purpose of this resource pack is to enable primary health care professionals with little or no previous experience of research to gain a basic understanding of qualitative research and the potential for this type of research in primary health care.

Today’s author, Monica Poinescu, a Software Developer in Test on the Excel team, discusses two different approaches to analyzing data in Excel.

Edit: I've attached a file at the bottom of this blog that contains spreadsheets of the examples discussed in this post.

My earlier blog on the new Excel 2007 function SUMIFS spawned a very interesting discussion (thanks to everyone who posted comments there): when trying to analyze/aggregate data in a table, how do we decide whether to use functions versus PivotTables?

This blog outlines reasons to use one option or another. 

The purpose of the Appraisal of Guidelines Research & Evaluation (AGREE) Instrument is to provide a framework for assessing the quality of clinical practice guidelines.

The AGREE Instrument is intended to be used by the following groups:

By policy makers to help them decide which guidelines could be recommended for use in practice. In such instances, the instrument should be part of a formal assessment process.
By guideline developers to follow a structured and rigorous development methodology and as a self-assessment tool to ensure that their guidelines are sound.
By health care providers who wish to undertake their own assessment before adopting the recommendations
By educators or teachers to help enhance critical appraisal skills amongst health professionals.

Objective

A sound theoretical foundation to guide practice is enhanced by the ability of nurses to critique research.  This article provides a structured route to questioning the methodology of nursing research.

Primary Argument

Nurses may find critiquing a research paper a particularly daunting experience when faced with their
first paper. Knowing what questions the nurse should be asking is perhaps difficult to determine when there may be unfamiliar research terms to grasp. Nurses may benefit from a structured approach which helps them understand the sequence of the text and the subsequent value of a research paper.

Conclusion

A framework is provided within this article to assist in the analysis of a research paper in a systematic, logical order. The questions presented in the framework may lead the nurse to conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the research methods presented in
a research article. The framework does not intend to separate quantitative or qualitative paradigms but to assist the nurse in making broad observations about the nature of the research.

There are various situations in which a research proposal is produced: 1) prior to enrolment (perhaps as part of an application for a scholarship and/or as an application for entry to study at a particular institution); 2) prior to beginning the research component of a degree that includes both coursework and research; 3) not long after enrolment in a research degree; and 4) at various stages in the first year or so of a research degree.

There are also various synonyms for a ‘research proposal’ produced during the course of a research degree, eg ‘position statement,’ ‘statement of intent’ or even ‘progress report.’
 

As the context of health care is changing due to the pharmaceutical services and technological advances, nurses and other health care professionals need to be prepared to respond in knowledgeable and practical ways. Health information is very often explained in statistical terms for making it concise and understandable. Statistics plays a vitally important role in the research. Statistics help to answer important research questions and it is the answers to such questions that further our understanding of the field and provide for academic study. It is required the researcher to have an understanding of what tools are suitable for a particular research study. It is essential for healthcare professionals to have a basic understanding of basic concepts of statistics as it enables them to read and evaluate reports and other literature and to take independent research investigations by selecting the most appropriate statistical test for their problems. The purpose of analyzing data in a study is to describe the data in meaningful terms.

Rubrics have been a long-requested feature and we're pleased to be able to say that now you can design and use rubrics to grade things in Moodle. Rubrics are actually the first plugin of a new 'Advanced Grading' plugin type which provides users to come up with all kinds of similar advanced grading interfaces and integrations programmatically. Currently the rubrics only work for Assignments but will be extended soon across all modules.

To be most effective, dissemination strategies must be incorporated into the earliest planning stages of a research study. In fact, the most successful dissemination processes are typically designed prior to the start of a project. In creating a dissemination plan, researchers should consider several key questions:

• Goal: What are the goals and objectives of the dissemination effort? What impact do you hope to have?
• Audience: Who is affected most by this research? Who would be interested in learning about the study findings? Is this of interest to a broader community?
• Medium: What is the most effective way to reach each audience? What resources does each group typically access?
• Execution: When should each aspect of the dissemination plan occur (e.g. at which points during the study and afterwards)? Who will be responsible for dissemination activities?

This thematic report provides an overview of ethics and ethical reviews in biomedical research. The purpose of the document is to brief non-specialists on the key aspects of the evolution and current debate of biomedical research ethics and assessment of proposed research by ethics committees or review boards. The briefing highlights principle areas of consensus and tension, and outlines different approaches to the formal ethical scrutiny of proposed research. Its overarching theme and international scope complements other country-specific briefings within RAND Europe’s Health Research System Observatory. The report will be of interest to government officials dealing with biomedical research policy, medical research councils, biomedical research charities, institutions hosting biomedical research projects, researchers, and patients.

In this podcast, Erin Edgerton, CDC, and Craig Lefebvre, George Washington University discuss social media, blogs, and mobile technologies and how they can be used for public health. Created: 5/15/2009 by National Center for Health Marketing (NCHM), Division of eHealth Marketing (DeHM). Date Released: 6/30/2009. Series Name: Health Marketing and Interactive Media.

In the past decade, the profession has witnessed a growth in the range of scientific conferences designed to meet the needs of general as well as specialist groups. This has stimulated a rise in the number of conference abstracts submitted by nurses wishing to disseminate aspects of their research or examples of innovation and good practice. As a result, the process of selecting abstracts is far more competitive and members of scientific panels have to make harsh decisions about which papers to accept and include in their conference programmes. This development is clearly an indicator of a maturing research-based discipline. However, a successful abstract submission requires meticulous planning and developing a style of writing that is clear, succinct and informative. The aim of this paper is to review the essential stages of developing a strategy for writing a
conference abstract that increases the chance of acceptance.

When caring for patients it is essential that nurses are using the current best practice. To determine what this is, nurses must be able to read research critically. But for many qualified and student nurses
the terminology used in research can be difficult to understand thus making critical reading even more daunting. It is imperative in nursing that care has its foundations in sound research and it is
essential that all nurses have the ability to critically appraise research to identify what is best practice. This article is a step-by step-approach to critiquing quantitative research to help nurses demystify the
process and decode the terminology.

The purpose of this course is to explore how mentoring can be used to build research competence in nursing in various professional and geographic settings. Discrete projects, multiple mentor sources, and mutually beneficial peer relationships can enable mentoring across ones career. Psychosocial dimensions of mentoring support creative work. When scholarly productivity with funded research is the desired outcome, intense involvement of a protg with an expert researcher is essential. 

Review the tips and tricks for creating and submitting applicant CVs using the Canadian Common CV.

Webcast:  6:20 minutes

What are Causal Loop Diagrams?

• An important tool for representing the feedback structure of systems

They are useful for

• Quickly capturing hypotheses about the causes of dynamics
• Eliciting and capturing the mental models of individuals or teams
• Communicating important feedbacks you think might be responsible for a problem
   

New! Chat live to PopData experts

Researchers are now able to chat live, via instant messaging, to experts for answers to questions about data access and for help with methodological and project related questions.

PopData Researcher Liaisons are available from 10am to 11am, Monday to Thursday, to help with a range of issues related to data access and the request process.

The Doctor Is In! Administrative data expert, Dr Kimberlyn McGrail, of UBC's School of Population and Public Health, is available via instant messaging on Mondays from 1pm to 2pm, to assist with research project-related issues.

If you can’t connect live during IM hours, you can log in and leave a message. 

Objectives
Following this lecture, the participants will be able to
1.  List the basic criteria in selecting the clinical research question
2.  Describe methods for developingthe question
3.  List potential sources for research questions
4.  List the categoriesof clinical research questions
5.  Outline the advantagesand disadvantages of different clinical research methods

Objectives
Following this lecture, the participants will be able to
1. List the basic criteria in selecting the clinical research question
2. Describe methods for developingthe question
3. List potential sources for research questions
4. List the categoriesof clinical research questions
5. Outline the advantagesand disadvantages of different clinical research methods

This video summarizes seven different statistical tests and gives a process by which you can decide which test to use in different circumstances. The tests are: Test for a mean, test for a proportion, difference of proportions, difference of two means - independent samples, difference of two means - paired, chi-squared test for independence and regression

Estimated total time: about 5 hours

Objective: To be able to decide if an intervention study is of sufficient quality that it can be applied to your own situation. In order to do this, you will understand and be able to apply the criteria for critical appraisal of an intervention study.

Process: This module is built on a scenario that will allow you to understand and apply each criterion for critical appraisal. After having read the scenario, you will be able to follow sequentially through the questions that allow you to critique and make a decision about the use of the study.

Purpose and objectives of module
The purpose of this learning module, therefore, is to build knowledge and skill in the area of evaluation of health and health research initiatives (including knowledge translation initiatives).

Objectives of the module are to:

1. Build knowledge among both researchers and reviewers of the potential for evaluation to support evidence-informed action;
2. Support development of appropriate evaluation plans required and/or appropriate for research funding proposals, and;
3. Facilitate assessment of evaluation plans by peer and merit reviewers

CINAHL®, the Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, is the most comprehensive resource for nursing and allied health literature. While starting out as a single bibliographic database, CINAHL has expanded to offer four databases including two full-text versions. CINAHL is owned and operated by EBSCO Publishing, with the Cinahl editorial team continuing to work out of the offices in Glendale, California. The CINAHL databases are available on EBSCOhost®, one of the most-used research platforms available.

What is CiteULike?

CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.

Why is it "social"?

You can share your library with others, and find out who is reading the same papers as you. In turn, this can help you discover literature which is relevant to your field but you may not have known about. The more people who use CiteULike, and the more they use it, the better it becomes as a resource. You can help with this process just by using CiteULike and through the invite a friend feature.

Check out InspireNet's CiteULike Library: http://www.citeulike.org/user/inspirenet

The objective of this handbook is to provide up-to-date, evidence-based, experience-driven guidance on how to use clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) most effectively to improve the care of patients.

Research Methods in the Social Sciences with a particular focus on qualitative research.

Coding Part 1: Alan Bryman's 4 Stages of qualitative analysis

Coding Part 2: Thematic coding

Coding Part 3: What can codes be about

Coding Part 4: What is coding for?

Coding Part 5: The code list or code hierarchy

Of the over two million college degrees that are granted in the U.S. every year, including those earned at accredited online colleges nationwide, probably two-thirds require completion of a statistics class. That’s over a million and a half students taking Statistics 101, even more when you consider that some don’t complete the course.

Everybody who has completed high school has learned some statistics. There are good reasons for that. Your class grades were averages of scores you received for tests and other efforts. Most of your classes were graded on a curve, requiring the concepts of the Normal distribution, standard deviations, and confidence limits. Your scores on standardized tests, like the SAT, were presented in percentiles. You learned about pie and bar charts, scatter plots, and maybe other ways to display data. You might even have learned about equations for lines and some elementary curves. So by the time you got to prom, you were exposed to at least enough statistics to read USA Today.

We’ve all seen posters filled with tiny print, blurry images, and disorganized text. Does anybody read them? A good poster is a well-positioned display of text and images that communicates just the highlights of your program to a mobile audience. The primary goal of a poster is to inform, but it can also advertise or stimulate conversation about ideas and concepts. It always markets your image and the image of your colleagues and institution. Whether you are creating a poster for a scientific conference or putting one together for a community event, the basics are still the same.

A good poster:

• Tells a story.
• Can be read from more than 5 feet away.
• Is interesting and eye-catching.
• Has a simple, uncluttered design.
• Uses clear language and images in a logical sequence.
• Summarizes key points without excess detail.

Quality Improvement (QI) and evaluation projects have become increasingly important, multiplying in number and growing in complexity. Although ethics oversight principals and processes are well established for research projects, a gap exists for non-research projects. Many QI and evaluation projects have ethical implications, but ethics screening and review processes are often limited and inconsistently applied. This uncertainty and inconsistency often leads to misunderstandings about how and when ethical implications should be addressed in QI and evaluation projects. Reviewing the following common misunderstandings and our responses to them should help clarify these issues for you and reinforce that sound practice requires integrating ethical considerations into your QI and evaluation projects to ensure that people are protected and respected.

Qualitative Research Design & Methods

• Getting started in health research
• Critical Revew Form: Qualitative Studies (McMaster University)
• Guidelines for Critical Review Form: Qualitative Studies (McMaster University)
• Guidelines to accompany the form linked to above. Section on Study Design describes Phenomenology, Ethnography, Grounded Theory, Participatory Action Research (PAR) and provides examples of studies using these designs. Also reviews data collection methods used in qualitative research. PDF Reader required.
• Handbook for team-based qualitative research
• Explores issues and challenges around collaborative research
• InterViews : learning the craft of qualitative research interviewing
• New qualitative methodologies in health and social care research
• Covers discourse analysis, imagework, cut-up technique, minimalist passive interviewing technique and social action research
• Qualitative methods for health research
• Covers "methodological principles, research designs and ethics; common strategies for generating data--in-depth interviews, group interviews, observation and documentary research--and ways to analyze the resulting data; and the practical issues of doing qualitative health research."
• Qualitative methods in public health: A field guide for applied research
• Provides detailed information study designs, data collection & analysis, research writing & dissemination. Includes research tips and sample materials.
• Qualitative research in health care (Bassett, C.)
• Qualitative research in health care (Pope & Mays)
• Essay format covers the following methods: interviews, focus groups, observation, and conversational analysis.
• Qualitative research methods
• Includes information on topics such as: qualitative case study research, cyber research and research with groups in vulnerable situations
• Sage Research Methods
• A web-based research methods tool that covers quantitative, qualitative and mixed methods. Researchers can explore methods and concepts to help design research projects, understand a particular method or identify a new method, and write up research.
   

Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research (CHIR) - The Consortium for Healthcare Informatics Research (CHIR) is a multi-disciplinary group of collaborating investigators affiliated with VA sites from across the US. The mission of CHIR is to improve the health of Veterans through foundational and applied informatics research. The primary purpose of CHIR is to advance the effective use of unstructured text and other types of clinical data in the electronic health record using natural language processing and other cutting edge technology. This series of cyber seminars highlights the tools, methods, and results of multiple CHIR research projects. The investigators and core research staff present their work in a format suitable for researchers ranging from informatics experts to traditional clinicians

Webcast:  Recorded presentation on Creating Effective Online Surveys 

56 minutes

This article outlines ten issues for critical appraisal of qualitative research which are related to a number of underlying themes. All activity within a research project should be related to the research question or underlying logic. Bias is an inherent threat to any research endeavour and steps should be taken within each activity to minimise its effects. In research reports the activities and procedures should be clearly described so that the reader can come to his or her own conclusions about the trustworthiness of the methods, analytical procedures and interpretation of the data. A further challenge for qualitative researchers is to present the degree of detail needed to address these issues in journal papers where space is limited.

The purpose of this guide is to provide a brief overview of the critical appraisal process.  Assessing the validity of research studies can be a complex and time-consuming undertaking. If  you are conducting a lengthy evaluation, you may wish to consult more exhaustive critical appraisal resources (a list of suggested further reading has been appended to this guide).  Participation in the Skills Enhancement for Public Health program offered by the Public Health Agency of Canada is recommended prior to attempting in-depth critical appraisal.

One you have selected a range of journal papers and other evidence to guide your work, it is important to read through the material carefully to check that it is not only relevant to your research focus, but also trustworthy in its procedures and findings. As Rutter et al. (2010: 50) point out:

"The relevance of a study to the review topic, and the appropriateness of design to address the review question, are two aspects of quality; the integrity of the methods used in the study, and the confidence we can have in its findings, are others."
 

To become a professional nurse requires that you learn to think like a nurse. What makes the thinking of a nurse different from a doctor, a dentist or an engineer? It is how we view the client and the type of problems we deal with in practice when we engage in client care. To think like a nurse requires that we learn the content of nursing; the ideas, concepts and theories of nursing and develop our intellectual capacities and skills so that we become disciplined, self-directed, critical thinkers.

Critical thinking is the disciplined, intellectual process of applying skilful reasoning as a guide to belief or action (Paul, Ennis & Norris). In nursing, critical thinking for clinical decision-making is the ability to think in a systematic and logical manner with openness to question and reflect on the reasoning process used to ensure safe nursing practice and quality care (Heaslip). Critical thinking when developed in the practitioner includes adherence to intellectual standards, proficiency in using reasoning, a commitment to develop and maintain intellectual traits of the mind and habits of thought and the competent use of thinking skills and abilities for sound clinical judgments and safe decision-making.

THE FRONT-LINE NURSE manager plays a key role in achieving organizational goals of delivering highquality care to satisfied patients.  Creating a positive work environment that fosters staff satisfaction is required of nurse managers (McGuire & Kennerly, 2006). The nurse manager must be a transformational leader capable of influencing staff to align with organizational goals (Robbins & Davidhizar, 2007). Critical thinking skills and the inclination to engage in critical thinking are essential for the nurse manager to function as a transformational leader.

Start thinking critically

• Understanding and critiquing qualitative research papers
• Understanding and critiquing quantitative research papers
• Guide to critical, analytical thinking
• Critical writing - useful phrases

Analyze data using Excel. Use standard deviation, make a graph with a trendline, include error bars, determine the uncertainty in the slope and y-intercept using LINEST.

8 min YouTube video

My name is David Roberts and I’m an independent consultant in evaluation and market research working out of Canberra, Australia. We recently had a discussion on AEA’s LinkedIn group focusing on using scales in surveys. While I am not an expert in analyzing scales here are some things I have found useful:

Rad Resource – Research from Jon Krosnick: Scroll down on the bio page from this Stanford professor to review summaries of his research on scales and to access study reports.

Hot Tip – Scaling Approach 1: One option for scaling responses is to analyze each individual’s responses and then score each response against the range of that individual’s responses. The simplest way to do so, is to treat each individual’s normal responses as varying around 0 and score accordingly. So if one person consistently rates between 4 and 5, a 4 is re-scored as -1 and a 5 is scored +1. Other responses are re-scored in terms of their distance from that individual’s median score. You can then analyze the scores for each question rather than the raw responses. It works better if you use at least a 7 point scale (Krosnik’s work suggests you should do that anyway). You can also use more sophisticated scoring methods based on range and standard deviation of the individual’s responses, but the utility of such an analysis is marginal for most applications.
 

Objectives

At the end of this session, you will be able to:
 

• Describe the definition of evidencebased practice and the steps to integrate evidence into practice
• Identify why evidence-based practice is important in healthcare today
• Identify the steps to critically appraise the research evidence

Offering practical answers to complex questions in qualitative research design.

Providing students in applied social and behavioral science disciplines with invaluable guidance on developing and successfully defending qualitative research proposals, the Fifth Edition of this bestselling text offers expanded coverage of ethics, data analysis, and research design techniques. Authors Catherine Marshall and Gretchen B. Rossman cover distance-based research (such as email interviews); the implications of postmodern turns; integrating archival material; and creative ways of presenting the research. The authors include updates to popular features, such as vignettes that illustrate the methodological challenges today's qualitative researcher face.

New to this EditionAn entire chapter devoted to ethical issues (as well as continuous coverage throughout the book) Expanded discussions of internet ethnography, cultural studies, critical race theory, and queer theory A greatly enhanced chapter on data analysis

This book is appropriate for all graduate-level Introduction to Qualitative Methods courses in education, nursing, sociology, human services, and other related fields.
 

Researchers from the Effective Health Care Program’s DEcIDE Network authored this 11-chapter guide that aims to serve as a resource for researchers when developing observational comparative effectiveness research (CER) studies. The user's guide identifies best practices for designing observational CER studies and standardizes the review of study protocols with checklists in each chapter. Topics in this user's guide include developing study objectives and questions, study design, data sources, and analysis.

Perhaps one of the most important first steps in undertaking research is to determine a well-defined and concise research question. This document outlines a step by step approach to articulating a research question.

Background:  Classification of study design can help provide a common language for researchers. Within a systematic review, definition of specific study designs can help guide inclusion, assess the risk of bias, pool studies, interpret results, and grade the body of evidence. However, recent research demonstrated poor reliability for an existing classification scheme.

Objectives: To review tools used to classify study designs; to select a tool for evaluation; to develop instructions for application of the tool to intervention/exposure studies; and to test the
tool for accuracy and interrater reliability.
 

Key Messages
• Effective knowledge translation is not a one-way transfer of information but a dynamic process of interaction and exchange.
• Knowing how to influence knowledge users is the objective behind a framework devised by Jacobson et al. to increase the use of research.
• Understanding how to target information to this all-important audience is central to the framework and critical to the strategy of researchers and knowledge brokers hoping to effect evidence-informed decisions.

The REB recognizes that it is difficult to determine the difference between an internal quality assurance (QA) project versus a research project requiring ethics approval because often the methodology is the same. This webpage includes helpful materials and links to other research ethics board resources.

This module is intended to help you to implement leadership for improvement. Within this module you will discover what leadership for improvement is, the differences between leading, managing and sponsoring, as well as the key attributes of leadership for improvement.
 

Efforts are currently underway in the US federal government to improve and strengthen evaluation practice and increase the use of evaluation results to inform policies and programs. However, these efforts remain unrealized, due partly to the lack of a comprehensive framework identifying the main types of evaluation policy an organization should consider. To generate a set of relevant types of evaluation policy for the US context, this study surveyed 600 members of the American Evaluation Association in 2009. Participants were asked to brainstorm examples of evaluation policy and then sort and rate them. Results were analyzed using a concept mapping technique. The end product is a "3Rs" evaluation policy inventory instrument, including step-by-step instructions for its use in organizations and a discussion of its applications in research on evaluation (policy).

Introduction

• Research refers to a systematic inquiry that uses disciplined methods to answer questions or solve problems.
• Research critique is careful, critical appraisal of the strength and limitations of a research study.
• Most studies have limitations and weakness.
• The authenticity of the research findings, need to be assessed by careful critical analysis as to broaden the understanding, determine evidence for use in practice and provide a background for conducting further study.
• No studies are without some imperfections.
• Research critiquing is not about finding faults in a study.
• Research critique is a mechanism to provide feedback for improvement. (Boswell & Cannon, 2010)

Online tutorial discussing website content evaluation when performing research activities.

EvaluationWiki was founded in September of 2006 by the non-profit organization Evaluation Resource Institute (ERI). The mission of EvaluationWiki is to make freely available a compendium of up-to-date information and resources to everyone involved in or interested in the science and practice of evaluation. This compendium will be a continually growing and evolving representation of evaluation knowledge.

This site provides a collection of resources that support teaching and learning in Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) for faculty, librarians, students, and other health care professionals.

This is a collection of tools for identifying, assessing and applying relevant evidence for better health care decision-making. The appraisal tools are adapted from the Users' Guides series prepared by the Evidence Based Medicine Working Group and originally published in JAMA.

Evidence based nursing, or EBN, is a form of clinical practice that relies on research findings to manage the health problems of a patient. It involves several processes that can contribute to a better understanding of a patient’s condition as well as the effectiveness of a certain treatment method. Evidence based nursing usually begins with the formulation of a question concerning a patient’s medical condition, and then, research is performed to find answers to the question. The relevancy of the research has to be proven and alternative forms of medical care have to be considered before evidence based practice is implemented.

In evidence based nursing, nurses play a more important role in the management of patients’ problems. Here is a list of websites that provide valuable information about evidence based nursing.
 

After completing these exercises you should be able to:

1. Define a Clinical Question
2. Translate a Clinical Question into a Searchable Question
3. Decide on the Best Type of Study to Address the Question
4. Perform a Literature Search in PubMed

This resource provides a collection of Evidence-based Practice links and information for nurses.

What to do, how to do it, and why

This guide explains everything you need to know to successfully implement evidence-based practice (EBP). Carefully progressing from the fundamental facts to full application, the book tells you exactly what EBP is, and describes how to:

• Create a culture of EBP
• Use journal clubs
• Answer questions with nursing research
• Relate EBP and nursing research to your journey to designation

Build your confidence as you increase your knowledge

Making the transition to EBP requires learning new skills and using a different process for clinical decision making. To smooth and speed your progress, this extremely practical reference includes:

• Case studies that reveal the real-life consequences, so you can learn from the successes of your colleagues
• Exercises to familiarize you with EBP and give you a preview of practice
• Helpful checklists to reinforce the text
• Examples from practice to help you implement EBP in your own facility

Improve outcomes, patient care, and satisfaction

A successful EBP program brings benefits for you, your patients, and your facility. Whether you are new to nursing or an experienced clinician who just needs to master EBP, this guide will give you the answers to all your questions.
 

The following tutorial is designed to support both curriculum-based EBP instruction and the ongoing education of practicing professionals.

The tutorial consists of five instructional modules:

• Introduction to Evidence-Based Nursing
• Structure of literature
• Research design
• Searching the literature
• Evaluating the quality of research

You may proceed through the modules sequentially or go directly to the modules that interest you most.
 

Learning Objectives:

- To understand the concept of Evidence-based practice
- To understand the importance of evidence-based practice in the clinical setting

Performance Objectives:

- Differentiate between the concepts of quality improvement, performance improvement, research utilization, and evidence-based practice.
- Describe how Evidence-based practice can be used to improve clinical practice.
- Identify process for implementation of evidence-based practice within a clinical setting.

A clearly defined question or problem is the starting point for an effective literature search. This step of the EIPH process helps you answer the question:

“Where should I look to find the best available research evidence to address the issue?”

Your search strategy should aim to locate the strongest quality and most relevant evidence first. When searching for quantitative evidence (e.g., effectiveness of an intervention, health effects, cost effectiveness, etc.) some study designs are considered stronger than others. It is important that the research design is the most appropriate to answer the question being asked.

Health Statistics provide information for understanding, monitoring, improving and planning the use of resources to improve the lives of people, provide services and promote their well being.

This course describes the range of available health statistics, identifies their sources and helps you understand how to use information about their structure as you search.

This course links to numerous examples. Each example opens in a separate page of your browser. To return to the course close the new window -- the course window remains open and you can proceed.
 

Qualitative research is defined as research that derives data from observation, interviews, or verbal interactions and focuses on the meanings and interpretations of the participants. (Holloway and Wheeler, 1995)

Strategies for Finding Qualitative Research Articles
Strategy 1: Use thesaurus terms

Databases use controlled keywords (known as thesaurus terms or subject headings) to categorize each record stored. PubMed, for example, uses Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), a highly structured thesaurus. The thesaurus terms vary for each database according to their indexing system. For example, qualitative research is indexed in PubMed as "Qualitative Research" or "Nursing Methodology Research", while in CINAHL their subject heading "Qualitative Studies" is complemented by more detailed terms, including "Phenomenological Research" and "Grounded Theory".

Strategy 2: Use Text Words

This strategy uses Text Word terms that might specifically identify qualitative research and searches the titles, abstracts and keywords of records held in the databases. Some Text Words (or keywords) include: qualitative, ethnograph*, phenomenol*, ethnonurs*, grounded theor*, purposive sample, hermeneutic*, heuristic*, semiotics, lived experience*, narrative*, life experiences, cluster sample, action research, observational method, content analysis, thematic analysis, constant comparative method, field stud*, theoretical sample, discourse analysis, focus group*, ethnological research, ethnomethodolog*, interview*.

Strategy 3: Use Qualitative Research Filters

Qualitative Research Filters are pre-formulated search strategies that have been constructed by librarians to help you retrieve articles in databases that deal with qualitative research. You can use the filter and then combine the results with your subject.

Texas Center for Adult Literacy & Learning

In the social sciences, focus groups are a more recent development than methods of collecting data such as surveys, questionnaires, and one-on-one interviews. The aim of this paper is to provide a very brief overview of focus group method.

Key Messages
• A new guide for knowledge transfer practitioners shows them how to get research into the hands of people who use it.
• The guide is organized around five key principles: determining the message; the target audience; the messenger; the transfer method; and the expected impact.
• Results are best when researchers and decision makers already have existing relationships built on ongoing exchanges of information and ideas.

Q.I. FUNDAMENTALS CLASSROOM

There are four Fundamentals of Quality Improvement video tutorials. At the bottom of this page, there is a discussion forum. Please feel free to comment or ask questions on any aspect of the video tutorials and the basics of quality improvement. To start a new discussion, please click 'Start your own Discussion'. To post you must register with ISQua Knowledge and log in.

For those of you who would like to take your participation further and receive a Certificate of Participation in the Fundamentals of Quality Improvement, please go to the 'My Project' tab where you can complete your own improvement activity plan and comment on the plans of others.
 

Here are some crucial tips for refining your Googling, as well as some other places to hunt down that last study you need for your thesis.

This on-line workshop provides an introduction to geographic information systems (GIS) and its strengths for research into health and well-being. Participants will learn the fundamental design and construction techniques used to create linkages between tabular health databases with geographic identifiers. Valuable information pertaining to the access and availability of data for health-related research in British Columbia is also included.

Audience: Workshop content is designed for individuals working with health data that have no experience using GIS but would like to learn how it can be applied in their research.

Free

The definitions presented here indicate the way in which the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation uses these terms in its work. Other organizations and individuals may define them differently.

What has been the real driver of violent crime in America? Not unemployment, or guns, or wealth disparities, or lack of access to education. According to a fascinating new Mother Jones article, it’s exposure to lead.

The piece builds a case around this thesis: “Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.” This isn’t totally crazy, since we know that lead is a destructive neurotoxin. But any skeptic out there would immediately wonder about the evidence behind such an encompassing claim, mainly because it rests mostly on population-level observational studies, which look at links between lead exposure in the environment and crime rates. As Dr. David Juurlink, a physician and researcher at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, told Science-ish, while lead could be the missing element in violent crime, “Many, many other factors also could, particularly in concert. Perhaps lead is one contributing factor, but it’s an abuse of the basic tenets of epidemiology to ascribe so much of the blame to lead.”

What has been the real driver of violent crime in America? Not unemployment, or guns, or wealth disparities, or lack of access to education. According to a fascinating new Mother Jones article, it’s exposure to lead.

The piece builds a case around this thesis: “Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.” This isn’t totally crazy, since we know that lead is a destructive neurotoxin. But any skeptic out there would immediately wonder about the evidence behind such an encompassing claim, mainly because it rests mostly on population-level observational studies, which look at links between lead exposure in the environment and crime rates. As Dr. David Juurlink, a physician and researcher at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, told Science-ish, while lead could be the missing element in violent crime, “Many, many other factors also could, particularly in concert. Perhaps lead is one contributing factor, but it’s an abuse of the basic tenets of epidemiology to ascribe so much of the blame to lead.”

What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites. Google Scholar helps you find relevant work across the world of scholarly research.

Features of Google Scholar

• Search diverse sources from one convenient place
• Find articles, theses, books, abstracts or court opinions
• Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
• Learn about key scholarly literature in any area of research

How are documents ranked?
Google Scholar aims to rank documents the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each document, where it was published, who it was written by, as well as how often and how recently it has been cited in other scholarly literature.

A few months ago, we introduced a limited release of Google Scholar Citations, a simple way for authors to compute their citation metrics and track them over time. Today, we’re delighted to make this service available to everyone! Click here and follow the instructions to get started.

Here’s how it works. You can quickly identify which articles are yours, by selecting one or more groups of articles that are computed statistically. Then, we collect citations to your articles, graph them over time, and compute your citation metrics - the widely used h-index; the i-10 index, which is simply the number of articles with at least ten citations; and, of course, the total number of citations to your articles. Each metric is computed over all citations and also over citations in articles published in the last five years.

Your citation metrics will update automatically as we find new citations to your articles on the web. You can also set up automated updates for the list of your articles, or you can choose to review the suggested updates. And you can, of course, manually update your profile by adding missing articles, fixing bibliographic errors, and merging duplicate entries.

This three-part Web conference series provided an overview of grey literature and approaches to searching the grey literature for health services research; a consumer's guide to conducting advanced searches of grey literature; and a producer's perspective on the "searchability" of grey literature and how to effectively produce and distribute research.

If you want to find out if your workplace safety intervention program is hitting its mark, this guide is for you. Aimed at safety professionals, the guide shows how to evaluate a program’s effectiveness and presents real-life examples. The guide was produced by the Institute for Work & Health and the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).

The Guide offers guidance and indicators to measure how information products and services contribute to improving health programs.

This user-friendly guide includes checklists and templates and links to other evaluation resources. The Guide will help you to:

• Complete a useful and credible evaluation;
• Develop a sound description of the program, including a program logic model;
• Develop a feasible evaluation methodology;
• Disseminate evaluation findings;
• Develop recommendations;
• Follow evaluation standards upheld by the Canadian Evaluation Society.

In this section, you will find an overview of Canada's health care system. More detailed information is also available on specific elements of the health care system, including health human resources, primary health care, home and community care and pharmaceuticals coverage. There is also information on studies examining the health care system and links to further information.
 

health-evidence.ca aims to support evidence-informed decision making (EIDM) in public health organizations across Canada by providing:

• easy access to current review-level research evidence through a searchable online registry
• organizational assessments of readiness for using research to guide decision making
• customized knowledge broker consultation and support for individuals, teams, and organizations to incorporate EIDM into routine organizational practices
• professional development and education related to EIDM
• tools to guide and support all stages of the EIDM process
   

Blogging and academic writing are often perceived as water and oil: They just don't go together. At least that's the perception I have encountered since I started pursuing my Ph.D. and writing blog posts.

In Steven Soderbergh's movie Contagion, one protagonist declares that blogging is like graffiti but with commas and periods. There is some truth to that, as many blogs are uninteresting and poorly written. And I am well aware that blogging does not always produce the highest quality of source material, as you might find in an article published in a peer-reviewed journal.

The growth of qualitative research holds the potential for vastly enriching our understanding
of phenomena in the health sciences. However, the potential of this trend is hampered by a
widespread inability of quantitative and qualitative researchers to talk to each other. The
authors’ concern in this area grows out of our experience reviewing small grant applications
for the National Institute on Aging, where they frequently find qualitative research proposals
scoring worse than do those using quantitative approaches. This article addresses practical
problems in communicating qualitative research to readers whose training and experience
is primarily quantitative. Two themes running through the discussion are the need for
detail and the explicit tying of methodological strategies to research goals.

Do you want to become better at searching online? The advice I give to my students is that it works just like with other skills: You need to practice more and more. The best way is to do this in an organized manner and that’s what “A Google A Day“, a new game on Google+ provides.

It asks you special questions in many topics and you have to find the solution through online search. It will give you hints or even show you the right search terms.
 

Bad presentations are painful—for both the presenter dying a slow death in front of a crowd and the bored audience members who have to sit through it. If your task is to create or deliver presentations that don't suck, here are five common presentation pitfalls to avoid and tips on making presentations that can instead inspire and inform.

Information must have three attributes to make it useful in daily clinical practice: it must be relevant to everyday practice, it must be correct, and it should require little work to obtain it. Your goal while Navigating the Maze of evidence-based information sources is to remember the "Usefulness of Medical Information Equation" that conceptually relates these three attributes in this manner:

Relevance x Validity / Work

Making a great poster can be fun and is certainly a challenge!

A GREAT POSTER IS...

readable,

Readability is a measure of how easily the ideas flow from one item to the next. Text that has lots of grammatical problems, complex or passive sentence structure, and misspellings is "hard to read".

legible,

If a text is legible, it can be deciphered. For example, an old book may not be legible if the paper has corroded or the lettering has faded. A common error in poster presentations is use of fonts that are too small to be read from 6-10 feet away, a typical distance for reading a poster.

well organized, and

Spatial organization makes the difference between reaching 95% rather than just 5% of your audience: time spent hunting for the next idea or piece of data is time taken away from thinking about the science.

succinct.

Studies show that you have only 11 seconds to grab and retain your audience's attention so make the punchline prominant and brief. Most of your audience is going to absorb only the punchline. Those who are directly involved in related research will seek you out anyway and chat with you at length so you can afford to leave out all the details and tell those who are really interested the "nitty gritty" later.

Here are some ideas about how to get the most attention for your efforts.

Common Steps of Scientific Research Methods

1. Defining a Question(a phenomenon)
2. Literature Review
3. Formulating a Hypothesis
4. Testing the Hypothesis
5. Interpreting the Results
6. Communicating the Results

Most students and beginning researchers do not fully understand what a research proposal means, nor do they understand its importance. To put it bluntly, one's research is only as a good as one's proposal. An ill-conceived proposal dooms the project even if it somehow gets through the Thesis Supervisory Committee. A high quality proposal, on the other hand, not only promises success for the project, but also impresses your Thesis Committee about your potential as a researcher.

A research proposal is intended to convince others that you have a worthwhile research project and that you have the competence and the work-plan to complete it. Generally, a research proposal should contain all the key elements involved in the research process and include sufficient information for the readers to evaluate the proposed study.

Regardless of your research area and the methodology you choose, all research proposals must address the following questions: What you plan to accomplish, why you want to do it and how you are going to do it.
 

AEA 2011 - Presentation by Jane Whynot and Mary Kay Lamarche as part of a panel that also included Lisa O'Reilly and Sanjeev Sridharan

This Toolkit was designed to assist health care settings in maximizing the potential of Clinical Practice Guidelines through systematic and well-planned implementation. It was also designed to accompany the Nursing Best Practice Guidelines (NBPGs) developed by the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) in order to facilitate their implementation.

Information literacy is about how to find the information you need quickly and use it effectively.

By becoming information literate, you will know where to look for information, how to find it, judge whether it is reliable and useful, and then apply it to your work.

Objective

This tutorial will provide you with an understanding of information literacy in six simple steps. Each step includes activities that will help you develop your information literacy skills.

Duration

You can work through the tutorial in your own time and don't have to complete it all in one session.

The ability to find, use, and communicate information effectively and ethically is commonly known as information literacy. It is the umbrella term for emerging literacies such as technology literacy, media literacy, and health literacy. Information literacy is the domain of all educators:

• The Association of American Colleges and Universities identified information literacy as one of the essential learning outcomes that prepare students for 21st century challenges.
• The"2010 Horizon Report," a collaboration between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium, indicated that the need for training in the related digital media literacy is a critical challenge in education for the next five years.
• The Council for Independent Colleges offers annual workshops for chief academic officers, librarians, and faculty on integrating information literacy at their campuses.

Using research evidence when making decisions about the organization and financing of health care has great appeal, yet decision-makers do not always use this information. The Informed Decisions Toolbox addresses this issue in six steps and aims to help the health care decision-maker:

In a researcher’s toolkit, the randomized controlled trial (RCT) is one of the best ways to produce valid evidence on the effectiveness of interventions, from prevention programs to treatment options. According to the established hierarchy of evidence, the most valid evidence from original research comes from RCTs, followed by cohort studies and then case control studies (see At Work, Fall 2005: www.iwh.on.ca/wrmb/cohort-studies-case-control-studies-and-rcts).

Here’s how RCTs work. Study participants are deemed eligible through a recruitment process that involves specific criteria for inclusion and an informed consent process.

Those eligible are randomly assigned, in a process that’s not unlike flipping a coin, into one of two groups or ‘arms’ of the study: (1) the intervention group, or (2) the control group. The first group receives the intervention being studied, which could be a new treatment or procedure. The second does not, and instead receives an inactive placebo, conventional treatment or nothing at all.

The cornerstone of RCTs is this: Because the allocation process is random, it minimizes the chance that people who received treatment and those who did not had different characteristics. In other words, with random allocation, any differences in outcomes between the intervention group and the control group can be attributed to the intervention, as opposed to any of the participants’ attributes like age or disease.

In this series, Research 101, we are taking you behind the scenes of a research project at the Institute for Work & Health (IWH), from start to finish.

Look behind every safety product invention, government occupational health and safety regulation or process improvement, and you will likely find research.

Research provides the facts about an occupational health and safety issue. It can help decision-makers with background information on a specific topic or help to fill in the gaps around an important health and safety question.

Although conducting research can be a time-consuming process, its rewards are endless: lives are saved, costs are decreased and productivity is enhanced.

Yet, how is research done? In particular, how do Institute for Work & Health (IWH) scientists carry out research?

Since 2005, the Institute has published a regular column called, "What researchers mean by..." in our newsletter, At Work. The column is designed to help readers better understand what researchers do and the language they use when reporting their findings.

This report is an informal review of the literature on integrating qualitative and quantitative forms of evidence. It explores five key themes. In summary, these are:

• the role of qualitative approaches in traditional trials and experimental studies, beginning with a general discussion of the rationale for multi-method research.
• at what point in the development of a field of knowledge it is appropriate to pull qualitative and quantitative learning together.
• the complex question of how to determine what constitutes good evidence from qualitative studies.
• a brief discussion of whether there are hierarchies of evidence within the different types of qualitative investigation, and conclude that it is unlikely that consensus can be achieved.
• considerations in some detail how the findings of qualitative and quantitative evidence may be synthesised. A discussion of some of the theoretical and methodological issues that remain to be resolved is presented, and the report concludes with some directions for research and development.

Is your institution discussing implementation of evidence-based practice? Are you a part of your institutionʼs efforts to achieve “Magnet Status”? Are you interested in improving patient outcomes? Then organizing a group of your peers to develop a journal club is a great idea! A formal journal club facilitates discussing and evaluating new research and its application to practice and improving patient care. The advantages of using a journal club are that you and your peers can keep current with new transplant knowledge, learn to evaluate the strength of the evidence, promote implementation of new knowledge into practice and improve patient outcomes.

Essays and other forms of academic writing are a popular means of assessment in this School and indeed at most universities. There are two main reasons.

• These kinds of writing are regarded as the best way of testing a student's understanding and learning.
• They are absolutely central to learning and development in higher education.

In other words, academic writing itself is a very powerful means of learning about a topic and about the writing process because it requires a lot of thinking over time. In this section about academic writing, we hope to give you some tips, advice and ideas to develop successful writing skills.

Learning Outcomes
When you have finished this section, you will have achieved:

• an understanding of the key features of a good essay;
• further development in your critical analysis skills and reflective writing:
• an appreciation of how to set about writing a good essay.

This tutorial is intended for any health care practitioner or student who needs a basic introduction to the principles of Evidence-Based Medicine.

Upon completion of this self-paced tutorial, you will be able to:

• define Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM)

• identify the parts of a well-built clinical question

• identify EBM searching strategies that could improve MEDLINE retrieval

• identify key issues that help determine the validity of the results of a study

This module is designed to be done sequentially, but does not have to be completed at one go! Take a break and come back to the next section.

As you work through this module some of the language and concepts that are discussed may be new to you. Take your time to become familiar with new terminology; each key term is hyperlinked to a glossary.

Estimated total time: 3.5-5 hours

This e-learning course is presented for your use by the National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR) of the National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The course is made up of seven modules and provides a description of several research scenarios for you to use to enlarge your health services research skills (case studies). The modules offer information on the content and history of health services issues, describe an introduction to the NLM health services research databases, and to literature analysis and study design.

Slides from the MLA CE class Introduction to HSR taught by NICHSR staff on May 23, 1998 are also available upon request for you to examine.

Introduction to Methods for Health Services Research and Evaluation provides an introduction to basic methods for undertaking research and program evaluation within health services organizations and systems. In addition to basic methods, the course also provides "the state of the art" in research and evaluation through the review of major completed studies. This course is recommended for students who will be carrying out policy research, social science research, or program impact evaluation within health delivery systems. It is also relevant to those who will apply the results of Health Services Research (HSR) done by others.

Dr. Aidah Abu ElSoud Alkaissi Division of Intensive Care & Anaesthesiology University of Linköping- Sweden

Nursing research in perspective In today´s world:

Nurses must become lifelong learners capable of reflecting on, evaluating, and modifying their clinical practice based on new knowledge

Introduction to SPSS (Version 18)

There is a single recording made with Elluminate (requires Java) that makes up the online "Introduction to SPSS".

The recording features three parts: Data entry and basic functions; Tables and Figures; Inferential statistics (chi-square, correlation, regression, t test, recoding and computing new variables). As part of the recording, the fully illustrated handouts are offered as a PDF download as well as another PDF showing an example questionnaire and two SPSS data files.  

Introduction to NVivo (Version 9)

Session 1: General introduction to NVivo at IOE and coding.

Session 2: Using NVivo -Loading data and preparing data for analysis.

Session 3: Using NVivo - Coding and searching.
 

Statistics is about extracting meaning from data. In this class, we will introduce techniques for visualizing relationships in data and systematic techniques for understanding the relationships using mathematics.

Kyle T. of Veritas Tutors in Cambridge, MA, discusses regression, the statistical analysis that build on correlational analyses and enables them to speak in terms of causality. In explaining regressive analysis, Kyle refers to the equation of a line, a formula popular in standard high-school Geometry.

Webcast:  9:30 minutes

The Center for Medical Technology Policy (CMTP) is an independent ,non-profit 501(c) (3) organization that seeks to advance health care innovation and effectiveness by improving the quality, relevance, and efficiency of health care research. CMTP works on methods, infrastructure and policy to support the conduct of comparative effectiveness research that generates information to assist patients, clinicians, and payers in making informed clinical and health policy decisions.

A new framework for critiquing health-related research is presented in this article. More commonly used existing frameworks tend to have been formulated within the quantitative research paradigm. While frameworks for critiquing qualitative research exist, they are often complex and more suited to the needs of students engaged in advanced levels of study. The framework presented in this article addresses both quantitative and qualitative research within one list of questions. It is argued that this assists the ‘novice’ student of nursing and health-related research with learning about the two approaches to research by giving consideration to aspects of the research process that are common to both
approaches and also that differ between quantitative and qualitative research.

Abstract
A new framework for critiquing health-related research is presented in this article. More commonly used existing frameworks tend to have been formulated within the quantitative research paradigm. While frameworks for critiquing qualitative research exist, they are often complex and more suited to the needs of students engaged in advanced levels of study. The framework presented in this article addresses both quantitative and qualitative research within one list of questions. It is argued that this assists the ‘novice’ student of nursing and health-related research with learning about the two approaches to research by giving consideration to aspects of the research process that are common to both approaches and also that differ between quantitative and qualitative research.

Because anyone can publish anything on the internet, it is very important to determine that the information you have found on a website comes from a reliable and authoritative source. So, how DO you evaluate a website?

Some hints are listed below. Ask yourself these questions when you are evaluating a website. Your answers will help you decide if the site appears to be a reliable source of information. In addition, we have provided a number of links to excellent guides for website evaluation.
 

At CIHR, knowledge translation (KT) is defined as a dynamic and iterative process that includes synthesis, dissemination, exchange and ethically-sound application of knowledge to improve the health of Canadians, provide more effective health services and products and strengthen the health care system.

This process takes place within a complex system of interactions between researchers and knowledge users which may vary in intensity, complexity and level of engagement depending on the nature of the research and the findings as well as the needs of the particular knowledge user.

We are pleased to announce that three knowledge translation learning modules are now freely available.

A Guide to Researcher and Knowledge-User Collaboration in Health Research

This learning module will lead those engaged in collaborative health research – both researchers and knowledge users – through many of the key issues that should be considered and addressed when taking an integrated approach to creating knowledge and translating it into action. The module includes many real-life examples and case studies to illustrate learning points discussed in each section.

Introduction to Evidence-Informed Decision Making

This module has been developed to increase understanding about the components of evidence-informed decision making. It is built on a scenario that allows the learner to understand and apply each stage of the evidence-informed decision making process.

Critical Appraisal of Intervention Studies

The objective of this module is to increase the learner's ability to decide if an intervention study is of sufficient quality that it can be applied to a particular situation. The module is built on a scenario that allows the learner to understand and apply each criterion for critical appraisal of an intervention study.

Fraser Health Department of Evaluation and Research Services (DERS) has developed a Knowledge Transfer and Exchange (KTE) Toolkit that will enable you to acquire, assess, adapt and apply evidence!

The Fraser Health KTE Toolkit is organized, user-friendly and includes:

• A glossary of KTE terms
• Evidence-based links relating to a wide variety of topic areas
• Resources to enable you to find and implement evidence into practice and decision-making

A guide for research degree students.

Climb the thesis mountain:

• Set up for success
• Design your project
• Build thinking and writing skills
• Develop oral communication skills
• Write the thesis

The EQUATOR Network library currently contains:

• An introduction to reporting guidelines
• Comprehensive lists of the available reporting guidelines, listed by study type:
  • Experimental studies
  • Observational studies
  • Diagnostic accuracy studies
  • Reliability and agreement studies
  • Systematic reviews
  • Qualitative research
  • Mixed methods studies
  • Economic evaluations
  • Quality improvement studies
  • Other reporting guidelines
  • Reporting data
  • Statistical methods and analyses
  • Sections of research reports
  • Specific conditions or procedures.
• Reporting guidelines under development
• Reporting guidelines in other research fields
• Guidance on scientific writing
• Guidance developed by editorial groups
• Medical writers - additional resources
• Research ethics, publication ethics and good practice guidelines
• Resources related to development and maintenance of reporting guidelines
• Editorials introducing reporting guidelines
• Guidelines for peer reviewers
• Case studies: How journals implement reporting guidelines
• Examples of good research reporting
• Useful and interesting presentations
• EQUATOR 'pick' - comments, discussion and other thought provoking articles and interesting quotes

Welcome to Innovation Network’s Logic Model Workbook. A logic model is a commonly-used tool to clarify and depict a program within an organization. You may have heard it described as a logical framework, theory of change, or program matrix—but the purpose is usually the same: to graphically depict your program, initiative, project or even the sum total of all of your organization’s work. It also serves as a foundation for program planning and evaluation.

This workbook is a do-it-yourself guide to the concepts and use of the logic model. It describes the steps necessary for you to create logic models for your own programs. This process may take anywhere from an hour to several hours or even days, depending on the complexity of the program.

If you want to interpret nursing research outcomes, you need to understand statistical power. Few nurses are familiar with the concepts of statistical power and power analysis. Learning about statistical power and related concepts will help you more accurately interpret research findings and determine what influence, if any, these findings should have on nursing practice.

Trying to map the flow of your process before improving it? Here's a primer on the 3 different kinds of flowcharts you can use. Includes step by step instructions on creating Top-Down, Deployment and Detailed flowcharts.

A flowchart is an outline or schematic drawing of the process your team is trying to measure or improve. It can also be a picture of an ideal process that you would like to use. Process mapping with flowcharts can help people:

• Agree on the steps of a process and the order in which they occur
• See some of the duplicated effort and other non-value-added steps that might be lurking in a process
• Clarify working relationships between people and organizations
• Target specific steps in the process for improvement.

Process mapping is especially useful in the measure and analyze phases of Lean Six Sigma methodology. There are several kinds of flowcharts. In this article we will look at Top-down flowcharts, Deployment flowcharts, and detailed flowcharts.
 

This tutorial will teach you how to conduct a survey and design a questionnaire. You'll learn the latest survey research techniques...what works and what doesn't. You'll discover the secrets used to maximize survey response rates, and how to design a questionnaire that gets at the true opinions of your sample. The tutorial is packed with information! It tells everything you need to begin writing your own market research surveys right now.

Evidence Informed Decision Making Workshop
May 3, 2011
 

• An overview of the resources available to you to find the research evidence
• An understanding of the different levels of “pre-appraised” sources of evidence
• An introduction to some new tools
• A feeling of excitement to explore them
   

An Introduction to Evidence-Based Practice for Nursing Students

Evidence-Based Practice is a five-step process:

1. Construct a relevant, answerable question from a clinical case.
2. Plan and carry out a search of the literature for the best external evidence
3. Critically appraise the literature for validity and applicability
4. Apply the evidence to your clinical practice
5. .Evaluate your performance

This guide has been produced for Local Government Improvement and Development (formerly the IDeA) by Valerie Garrow, Associate Director at the Institute for Employment Studies. It has been developed for practitioners working for councils and public health organisations who have been given the task of evaluating the impact of a project or initiative. It will take you through the process of designing, implementing and disseminating an impact assessment and will also provide information on the range of tools and help that is available. It aims to be a practical guide, helping you to design and conduct effective and appropriate impact assessment.

Key Messages
• The Canadian Academy of Health Sciences recently proposed an evaluation framework designed to address specific impact evaluation questions about the value of health research and health research funding.
• Among the greatest challenges in assessing impact is the definition of “impact” itself, which can be different for every funding program. Defining the impact of health services research poses its own challenges — for example, it is often not feasible to define ideal policy- or decision-making impacts, since the research rarely yields unambiguous conclusions with obvious application.
• Case studies are emerging as a popular method for measuring the impact of health research, since they help to identify the factors that lead to research success.

Key Messages
• A common reason for measuring the impact of research is to demonstrate accountability, but results of measuring can also be used to guide improvements in research and programming.
• Health research impacts generally include: knowledge production; research capacity-building; informed decision-making; health and health sector benefits; and economic benefits.
• Among some of the widely used methods for measuring the benefits from research are bibliometric analysis, economic rate of return, peer review, case studies, logic modelling, and benchmarking. Taking a multi-indicator, multi-method approach is advised.

Purpose:
The purpose of the Menu of Indicators is to serve as a reference tool to guide the selection of indicators in the areas of management and leadership capacity development.

Description:
The Menu of Indicators is organized into four sections:

• Indicators of Organizational Management Capacity–The indicators in this section focus on several management systems as defined by Management Sciences for Health (MSH) as essential systems for effective organizational performance. These management systems include planning, human resource management, management information system, quality assurance, financial and resource management, logistics, and monitoring and evaluation. The indicators in this section cover both the immediate outcome of a given intervention and its use.
• Indicators of Work Group and Organizational Leadership Capacity–The indicators in this section cover both immediate and intermediate results of leadership capacity development at the work group and organizational level. At the work group level, the indicators are designed as a simple self-assessment tool that a team can apply periodically to monitor its use of the leading practices which include scan, focus, align and mobilize, and inspire. At the organizational level, the indicators measure the extent to which an organization routinely address and supports ongoing leadership capacity building.
• Indicators of Organizational Sustainability–The indicators in this section measure beyond organizational and work group capacity at the operational level to organizational performance in the face of change.
• Program Specific Indicators–This section provides indicators for specific programs offered by the Leadership, Management and Sustainability (LMS) Program or MSH such as the various virtual projects and networks.

Presents fundamental concepts in applied probability, exploratory data analysis, and statistical inference, focusing on probability and analysis of one and two samples. Topics include discrete and continuous probability models; expectation and variance; central limit theorem; inference, including hypothesis testing and confidence for means, proportions, and counts; maximum likelihood estimation; sample size determinations; elementary non-parametric methods; graphical displays; and data transformations.

Monitoring of a program or intervention involves the collection of routine data that measure progress toward achieving program objectives. It is used to track changes in program performance over time. Its purpose is to permit stakeholders to make informed decisions regarding the effectiveness of programs and the efficient use of resources.

Evaluation measures how well the program activities have met expected objectives and/or the extent to which changes
in outcomes can be attributed to the program or intervention. The difference in the outcome of interest between having or not having the program or intervention is known as its "impact" and is commonly referred to as "impact evaluation."

We live in a time of unprecedented access to information...data. Whether researching the best school, job, or relationship, the Internet has thrown open the doors to vast pools of data. Statistics are simply objective and systematic methods for describing and interpreting information so that you may make the most informed decisions about life. 

MOOCs: A massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web. MOOC participants do not need to be a registered student in a school to "take" a MOOC, and are not required to pay a fee. Though the design of and participation in a MOOC may be similar to college or university courses, MOOCs typically do not offer credits awarded to paying students at schools. However, assessment of learning may be done for certification.

More information about MOOCs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
 

The goal of this text is to give the reader a thorough grounding in old-school multivariate statistical analysis. The emphasis is on multivariate normal modeling and inference, both theory and implementation. Linear models form a central theme of the book. Several chapters are devoted to developing the basic models, including multivariate regression and analysis of variance, and especially the “both-sides models” (i.e., generalized multivariate analysis of variance models), which allow modeling relationships among individuals as well as variables. Growth curve and repeated
measure models are special cases.

The linear models are concerned with means. Inference on covariance matrices covers testing equality of several covariance matrices, testing independence and conditional independence of (blocks of) variables, factor analysis, and some symmetry models. Principal components, though mainly a graphical/exploratory technique, also lends itself to some modeling.

The toolkit includes advice on project planning for transcribing, tips for good quality recordings, advice on equipment and software and suggestions to help you save time while transcribing. Plus you can also use our spreadsheet to work out how long your transcribing will take and watch our mini-tutorial to show you how to add line numbers to your transcript.

This toolkit draws on my experiences of using email interviews in a qualitative, mixed method study of older (30+) music fans in three popular music ‘scenes’: Northern and rare soul, Rock, and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). I used participant observation and interviews, with one traditional and one online approach for each. Participant observation was done at music events and on virtual music discussion forums. Interviews took place either face-to-face or via email. This toolkit concentrates on my experiences of using email interviews, reflecting on how this method affected data collection and
analysis, and discussing how the method works in practice.

We are pleased to announce the creation of our new NCCMT Learning Centre where you can easily track your progress through our online learning modules.

Log in. Track your progress. Check out the additional opportunities available from NCCMT.
 

Objective:

To understand the process of evidence-informed practice.
 

The goal of this program is to enhance nurses’ skills in networking to keep their professional careers fit. After you study the information presented here, you will be able to –

• Identify four potential resources to contact for networking.
• Outline steps for face-to-face networking.
• Describe three self-marketing sales props for use in effective networking.

Critical appraisal: what is it?

Critical appraisal is the process of carefully and systematically examining and evaluating research to judge its trustworthiness, and its value and relevance in a particular context.

Why do we need to evaluate information?

If you thought that critical appraisal was just "trashing papers" or that all papers that make it to publication must be reliable, you probably need to take another look at critical appraisal.

• Evaluating information is an integral part of Evidence-Based Practice because some of the information on the internet and some published articles in healthcare journals are examples of bad research that shouldn't be applied to current practice. We cannot take conclusions for granted.
• As a healthcare professional it is important to question your information sources constantly. If you are basing decisions about patient care on research or using evidence to back up your theories in an assignment, then you need to make sure the research stands up to scrutiny.
   

In this section you will find e-Learning resources to help you along your quality improvement learning journey.

Quality Improvement Modules

• Introduction to Our Purpose and Values
• Introduction to Quality and Quality Improvement
• Introduction to Person-centred Healthcare
• Introduction to Healthcare Systems
• Introduction to Quality Improvement Methods
• Introduction to Measurement for Improvement
• Lean in Healthcare
• Knowledge into Practice in Healthcare
• Building a Quality Culture
• Leading Quality Improvement
• Creativity and Innovation in Healthcare
• Introduction to Data Analysis
• Measurement for Improvement - Presenting Data
• Evaluating Quality Improvement
• Introduction to Statistical Process Control

Module Aims

1. To provide participants with the opportunity to learn and practice a range of quantitative techniques appropriate to their work context 
2. To facilitate the development of a critical appreciation for the challenges and limitations of quantitative research 

Module learning outcomes
At the end of the module the learner will be expected to be able to:

1. Discuss the key assumptions of quantitative research and the measurement of empirical phenomena 
2. Describe and evaluate a range of quantitative techniques suitable utilised in applied research
3. Construct variables and discuss their validity and reliability
4. Select appropriate quantitative techniques for particular research questions

All healthcare professionals require a reasonable level of numeracy for the safe administration of medicines and fluids, budgeting and the interpretation of statistics.

This course is designed for you to work through on your own. You might like to have calculator, pencil and paper to hand. (There is a calculator available under Start->Programs->Accessories).

The Course Material includes technique and application topics and forms the main part of the numeracy skills course. The sections can be worked through independently.The tasks can be completed as many, or as a few, times as wished.

The Assignments section contains multiple-choice quizzes to practice your measurement skills. Feedback is available as soon as a quiz is completed.

Please use the Discussion Board found under communication to make any suggestions or comments.

Help explains various aspects of using the Numeracy Skills course. Within the course, click the Help button (at the top-right of each page) to bring up the help screen.

Each issue of Nurse Author & Editor consists of articles offering advice on writing quality manuscripts, avoiding rejection, finding publishing opportunities, editing and reviewing. Each issue also has a section containing short articles to update readers on new developments in nursing journals and journal publishing.

The goal of this program is to provide nurses with a better understanding of how informatics and information technology support quality patient care. After studying the information presented here, you will be able to —

• Describe healthcare and nursing informatics.
• Describe technologies available to support clinicians in providing patient care.
• Discuss ways in which nurses can participate in the implementation of new technology.

Nursing Literature Search & Review - Presentation Transcript (slides)

A guide to online and print resources in nursing.

Nurses and other healthcare professionals are constantly seeking tools as they gather, evaluate, and grade research and other evidence.

Various individuals within the SCAL Nursing Research Program have developed the following documents over the past several years. These tools cover a variety of applications, such as the definition of terms, application of statistical methods, and the review of qualitative/quantitative research. Please take the time to examine these useful tools and other research/EBP resource links.

This learning material is a series of modules, exercises and research examples for the benefit of any nurse at Providence Health Care who may be interested in furthering their knowledge in the area of research. Each module has its own distinct content but all share the same features in that they are essentially "how to" guides.

Course Outline

Objectives:
1. To support nurses and allied health professionals in their learning of the principles of research design at an introductory level.
2. To enable the learner to identify clinical and academic research issues from the nursing and broader health care community.

Educational Methods:
This is a 5 Module online course that includes the following content:
• Required reading of research case material
• Learning-centred exercises

Evaluation:
Learners may conduct self-evaluations by completing the evaluation requirements at the end of the course. Each module includes exercises that are to be completed to ensure complete learning facilitation. While the modules draw on specific research problem examples, these may be tailored to accommodate individual research issues and to allow for maximum capacity learning.

OCBR-UVic is pleased to offer the following four documents in “The CBR Booklet Series” which highlight CBR concepts, practices and resources.

1. What is CBR?
2. CBR & Partnerships
3. Creative Methods in CBR
4. Why CBR Matters

We thank Drs. Robin Hood and Catherine Etmanski, Marc Christensen and Pamela Spalding for their research, writing and layout work.

The booklets are downloadable and intended to be widely used and distributed. We acknowledge core support for this work from the University of Victoria Research Services, and a grant from the Vancouver Foundation via the BC Healthy Communities CBR Capacity Building Project. Other Canadian and global CBR resources are available on the OCBR and Community Based Research Canada websites
 

Online Statistics: An Interactive Multimedia Course of Study is a resource for learning and teaching introductory statistics. It contains material presented in textbook format and as video presentations. This resource features interactive demonstrations and simulations, case studies, and an analysis lab.

OpenIntro Statistics is a free textbook for introductory statistics. We know quality is key, and we've spent thousands of hours to make this textbook ready to compete on any stage. The book can be downloaded for free as a PDF or purchased on Amazon.com for $9.02.

PowerPoint:  Oral Presentations Workshop

Preparing, Presenting, and Using PowerPoint as An Effective Aid

Part 1: Preparing an Oral Presentation
Part 2: Presenting an Oral Presentation
Part 3: Using PowerPoint Effectively
 

Objectives:

• Identify the components of a research article
• Use a systematic approach to evaluate a nursing research article

Objectives

• Identify a topic to develop into a manuscript for publication.
• Identify at least one strategy for brainstorming potential content around a topic.
• Discuss strategies for overcoming writer's block or fear of writing.
• List the characteristics of a good manuscript.

Study guide

This guide addresses the task of planning and conducting a small research project, such as for an undergraduate or masters’ level dissertation. It aims to help you develop a clear sense of direction early on in the project, and to support you in organising, planning, and monitoring your project.

The companion guide Writing a dissertation focuses on the preparation of the written report or thesis.
 

The aim of this toolkit is to highlight key issues that might arise out of leading or working on a mixed methods research project. It will be useful for both Principal Investigators or project leaders and other team members alike, and will offer a practical guide to help prepare for, design and carry out a mixed methods project. The focus of this toolkit is in other words on the practical aspects of such work, covering some of the more common pitfalls that mixed methods projects might face: the importance of
teamwork; the need to allow for extra time; issues around data analysis and integration; and publishing from mixed methods projects. By highlighting these potential challenges as something worth considering at the outset of a project, we by no means intend to put you off from embarking upon mixed methods research, but rather hope to make the experience even more enjoyable.

Program Development & Evaluation Quick Tips provide the faculty and staff of Cooperative Extension with easy-to-use, practical suggestions for improving their program development and evaluation practices. They are generally one or two pages in length, free of confusing jargon and based on basic, solid principles of program development and evaluation. Each suggests sources for further reading for people who are interested in greater detail.

Doing More With What You Know
Supports the planning of knowledge exchange activities beyond publication in peer-reviewed journals and presentations at conferences. The toolkit offers concrete tools including a checklist, emerging concepts, scenarios, vehicles, a glossary and suggested readings for further ideas and information.

Good program evaluations assess program performance, measure impacts on families and communities, and document program successes. With this information, programs are able to direct limited resources to where they are most needed and most effective in their communities.

To help programs fulfill these goals, the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF) has developed the Program Manager's Guide to Evaluation. The Guide explains program evaluation -what it is, how to understand it, and how to do it. It answers your questions about evaluation and explains how to use evaluation to improve programs and benefit staff and families.

Research Project Management is proposed as a distinct sub-discipline within the profession. The elements that make research projects uniquely challenging for project managers who work on them as well as the skills and qualities they must possess to succeed are explored.

Reading and understanding research is challenging and is often cited as a barrier to research application (1-3). Generally novices require more time to read, understand, and critique studies than experienced advance practice nurses (APNs) (4), but many find the research critique to be a helpful learning activity (5). Lack of familiarity with terms and lack of confidence in ability to understand the findings can make the experience of reading and critiquing research intimidating and frustrating. Few nurses regularly read research; and alarmingly, Wood (6) recently noted that trepidation, antipathy, and apathy toward research have not improved in the past two decades (7). Regular reading to gain insight into best evidence useful for practice is essential if nursing is to meet the goal of improving health care through the implementation of evidence-based practice (8). Thus, strategies to improve the skills of APNs in reading and understanding research can make the experience less overwhelming, time consuming and frustrating. Recent findings have shown that reading research increases critical thinking skills (9), thus benefiting not only patients but also nurses. This article reviews an APN Research Guide devised, used and refined for 12 years by nurses who have evaluated the guide positively. Data are included to support their evaluations. Understanding research is an essential first step towards evidence-based practice (10-12).

This APN Research Guide fills a major gap in critique guides. This guide is short (4 pages), easily printed with space for responses, and contains the first scoring criteria since Duffy's criteria was published in 1985 (13). The point allocations for this critique were derived by the authors who are experienced clinicians and researchers. While other critique guides exist, the ones in research texts are generally long, presented as text boxes within chapters, and lack space for readers to include notes as they critique.

PubMed comprises approximately 20 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. PubMed citations and abstracts include the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, the health care system, and preclinical sciences. PubMed also provides access to additional relevant Web sites and links to the other NCBI molecular biology resources. PubMed is a free resource that is developed and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), located at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

This page provides the following specialized PubMed searches for clinicians:

• Search by Clinical Study Category
  • This search finds citations that correspond to a specific clinical study category. The search may be either broad and sensitive or narrow and specific.
• Find Systematic Reviews
  • For your topic(s) of interest, this search finds citations for systematic reviews, meta-analyses, reviews of clinical trials, evidence-based medicine, consensus development conferences, and guidelines.
• Medical Genetics Searches

After running one of these searches, you may further refine your results using PubMed's Limits feature.

Results of searches on these pages are limited to specific clinical research areas.

Welcome to the "PubMed Tutorial", the Web-based learning program that will show you how to search PubMed®, the National Library of Medicine (NLM®) journal literature search system.

This tutorial was updated in May 2010, and reflects PubMed changes through April 16, 2010. To see a list of recent PubMed changes, go to PubMed's New/Noteworthy.

Goals and Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Understand PubMed's scope and content.
• Understand how the MeSH vocabulary is used to describe and retrieve citations.
• Build a search using MeSH and PubMed search tools
• Manage your results using display, sort, the Clipboard, save, print, e-mail and order features and My NCBI filters.
• Save your search strategies.
• Link to full-text articles and other resources.
• Use special queries and other PubMed/NCBI tools.

Research Design Review is an online blog that began in November 2009 with the intention of providing suppliers, end-users, and students of qualitative and/or quantitative research with a resource for thinking about and discussing research design issues. RDR addresses the basic question, “Is it good research?” - meaning, does the research design (regardless of method) adhere to common
standards or principles that are generally agreed to support some degree of confidence in our research findings. RDR currently includes over 40 posts concerning quantitative and qualitative research design
issues. This paper presents a selection of articles from RDR specific to qualitative research design. It is hoped that greater awareness and understanding of the factors impacting qualitative research design
will lead to more useful, higher-quality outcomes.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has sponsored the Qualitative Research Guidelines Project to develop a website that will be useful for people developing, evaluating and engaging in qualitative research projects in healthcare settings.

The goals of this project are to:

• Identify and describe a wide range of qualitative research methods, interpretive and analytic approaches commonly used in healthcare research
• Identify published criteria for designing high quality qualitative research projects that reflect the values of the healthcare community.
• Provide links to publications that exemplify excellence in qualitative research.
• Address issues around the integration of qualitative and quantitative research approaches in multi-method studies
   

INTRODUCTION

• Qualitative research methods have become increasingly important as ways of developing nursing knowledge for evidence-based nursing practice. Qualitative research answers a wide variety of questions related to nursing's concern with human responses to actual or potential health problems. (Ploeg J, 1999)
• Qualitative research is a type of scientific research which has its roots in philosophy and human sciences.
• Qualitative research plays an important part in providing evidence for practice in nursing, and is gaining greater acceptance within medicine. (Bailey C, 2002)
   

Welcome to the NCCMT Learning Centre, where you can track your progress and recieve certification for our online learning modules. Log in. Track your progress. Check out the additional opportunities available from NCCMT.

Our new Learning Centre is designed to help you to easily track your progress through all our online learning opportunities.

Our new Quantitative Research Designs 101 module is already housed in the new Learning Centre.

The general principle of question wording is that every respondent should understand the question and be able to answer it with reliability – that is, if she were asked the same question again, she would give the same answer. So question wordings are evaluated in terms of whether they can provide reliable information. A number of common problems have been identified, as well as solutions for dealing with them.

Do you need assistance developing a questionnaire and planning for the collection of results? Institutional Research & Evaluation (IR&E) can provide guidance and help. IR&E provides support to faculty and staff working to develop surveys or questionnaires, including end of semester faculty evaluations, departmental development evaluations, and research or opinion questionnaires.

Listed are links to discussions on a variety of topics intended to assist with the development, organization, and implementation of a questionnaire. St. Olaf College also offers FORM CREATOR, an online evaluation development and feedback system, to be utilized by St. Olaf faculty, staff, and students.

Rapid evidence-assessments (REAs) are reviews and assessments of health evidence on specific topics or in response to specific clinical questions. A rapid evidence assessment should provide a robust synthesis of the existing international evidence in as little as four to six weeks for specific research questions. In terms of methodology, REAs follow some of the principles of the systematic review but within a much shorter time frame; concessions are also always made in terms of methodological rigour. That said, REAs have their place in literature reviews and are starting to gain favour in Canada, the United States and the UK especially within the educational, government and policy sectors.

What is their value in medicine?
According to the research, REAs are (re)appraisals of evidence that fall between health technology assessments (HTAs) and fully-developed systematic reviews. They are, in that sense, similar to 'scoping studies or question scans but usually include much more detail. REAs order the research in a similar way to systematic reviews but meet shorter and much more urgent timelines - usually within two months or less. The prominence of evidence-based medicine and its principles have led some health organizations to develop more rapid methods for accessing, appraising and synthesizing evidence in health care. Typically this can be a slow and expensive process and should never be undertaken for issues that have been extensively written about or where the opposite is true: a lack of evidence. In any case, REAs may offer a suitable alternative to more systematic methods. One of the first steps is to find out what has been written and what is already known. Rigorous systematic review searching is needed for a range of academic and scientific disciplines. Health librarians and biomedical researchers should consider REA-type reviews to address the need to apply the evidence more quickly without the need to conduct a full systematic review.

Rapid 'cumulation' is critical
The knowledge economy has developed considerably in recent decades. However, the number of publishing outlets and ease of publishing in the digital era is responsible for a lot of the information overload we experience in health. The sheer amount of evidence that is available, coupled with the rapid growth of scholarly publishing and communication tools, makes it difficult and often extremely time-consuming to cumulate the literature in given areas. The problem of locating many separate and similar clinical studies has led to the creation of newer forms of knowledge management such as the rapid review. Despite the concerns expressed about its methodological shortcomings, the REA is widely-used in public policy and health technology assessment.
 

It is important to reconsider evaluation criteria regarding scientific adequacy in health care research. In this article the authors review the four pairs of quantitative/qualitative paradigms. They discuss the use of evaluation criteria based on a pragmatic perspective after examining the epistemological issues behind the criteria. Validity/credibility is concerned with research framework, whereas reliability/dependability refers to the range of stability in observations, objectivity/confirmability reflects influences between observers and subjects, and generalizability/transferability has epistemological differences in the way findings are applied. Qualitative studies should not always choose qualitative paradigms, and
vice versa. If stability can be assumed to some extent in a qualitative study, it is better to use a quantitative paradigm. Regardless of whether it is quantitative or qualitative research, it is important to recognize the four epistemological axes.
 

Stakeholder involvement increases evaluation use and has become accepted practice within the evaluation profession, as evidenced by a survey conducted in 2006 which found 98% of American Evaluation Association members agreed that evaluators should take the responsibility for involving stakeholders in the evaluation process. Stakeholder values and involvement differs across organizations, causes, and the utilization of findings in their decision making processes. In order to fulfill the mission of the program evaluation, an evaluator must effectively communicate findings through identifying and understanding stakeholders' values. Attendees of this skill-building workshop will be provided with hands on experience necessary to articulate stakeholders' values, and to frame, document and disseminate findings based on these values. Attendees will also be provided with scenarios of program evaluations and directed through the process of communicating findings to specific stakeholder audiences. Additionally, attendees will receive a list of resources for further practice and learning.

Research 101 is an interactive online tutorial for students wanting an introduction to research skills. The tutorial covers the basics, including how to select a topic and develop research questions, as well as how to select, search for, find, and evaluate information sources.

PowerPoint presentation of research basics.

Google Docs has a new feature that lets you find more information about some of the words from a document and also add content from the Web. The research sidebar can be enabled from the Tools menu or by using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+R (Cmd +Opt+R for Mac). You can also select one or more words from the document, right click and select "Research" from the menu.

A website designed for students learning new research skills:

Step 1: Developing A Research Question
Step 2: Developing A Research Thesis
Step 3: Finding Sources
Step 4: Evaluating Sources
Step 5: Taking Notes
Step 6: Working With Quotations
Step 7: Writing Summaries And Paraphrases
Step 8: Building The Essay Draft
Step 9: Documenting Sources
Step 10: Revising And Proofreading The Draft

Abstract:
Qualitative research is type of formative research that includes specialized techniques for obtaining in-depth responses about what people think and how they feel. It is seen as the research that seeks answer to the questions in the real world. Qualitative researchers gather what they see, hear, read from people and places, from events and activities, with the purpose to learn about the community and to generate new understanding that can be used by the social world. Qualitative research have
often been conducted to answer the question “why” rather than “what”. A purpose of qualitative research is the construction of new understanding. Here, we present an overview of application
of qualitative methods in health research. We have discussed here the different types of qualitative methods and how we and others have used them in different settings/scenarios; sample size and sampling techniques; analysis of qualitative data; validity in qualitative research; and ethical issues.

Key Messages
• For some studies – including those expected to receive significant news media attention – the most important time for researchers and decision makers to interact is near the end of the study, with interaction continuing when and after study findings are released.
• When studies generate considerable public attention, stakeholders want knowledge translation efforts like forums and web conferences to take place close to the release date of the study’s findings.
• Discussions between researchers and decision makers should continue after the findings become public, to look at what the findings mean and how they can be put into action.

Critical appraisal is an integral process in Evidence Based Practice. Critical appraisal aims to identify methodological flaws in the literature and provide consumers of research evidence the opportunity to make informed decisions about the quality of research evidence.

Below is a list of critical appraisal tools, linked to the websites where they were developed. iCAHE staff will update this webpage as new critical appraisal tools are published.

Please choose a type of study:

• Randomised Controlled Trials
• Non-Randomised Controlled Trials
• Other Quantitative Research
• Case Studies
• Qualitative Research
• Mixed Methods Research
• Systematic Reviews
• Meta-Analysis
• Outcome Measures
• Clinical Guidelines - featuring iCAHE's Guideline CAT
• Assessing Treatment Choices
• Finding your own CATs
• Constructing your own CATs

Statistics are used to measure and make sense of the world. They are produced by the Government, political parties, the civil service, the Bank of England, opinion polls, campaign groups, social research, scientific papers, newspapers and more. But when confronted with stories such as “Crime rate rising again”, “Polls put Tories up to 7% ahead”, “Child heart surgery halted at hospital after four deaths” or “Swine flu ‘could kill up to 120m’”, how can we work out whether to believe them and what they really mean?

Statistics can be hyped and sensationalised by the use of an extreme value to make a story more dramatic or by reporting a relative increase in risk without including the absolute change. Data may be analysed and presented in different ways to support contradictory arguments or to reach different conclusions, whether deliberately or by mistake.

Description

A presentation by Mike Hendricks at Evaluation 2011 on six practical steps to offering effective recommendations
 

Tutorial outlining smart general research strategies.

A series of lectures given to postgraduate (graduate) students at the University of Huddersfield about social research methods and research design. Topics covered include issues of the quality of both qualitative and quantitative research including reliability, validity, generalizability, trustworthiness credibility and consistency. The key designs of surveys, experiments and case studies are examined and then a range of forms of data collection, including, questionnaires, interviews, documents, ethnography, repertory grids, and diaries are discussed.

This on-line workshop provides participants with an understanding of different methods and associated statistical concepts involved in space-time disease surveillance. Workshop content focuses on spatial analysis of disease data in a GIS environment, spatial statistics, and analysis scenarios for cluster analysis and cluster detection.

Audience: Workshop content is designed for health geomatics professionals, public health workers, researchers, and epidemiologists.

Free

his on-line workshop provides an introduction to spatial epidemiology, focusing on assessing exposures in a geographical information system (GIS) for use in epidemiological studies. Participants will learn about spatial health data and area socio-economic data available in BC, spatial exposure assessment methods, analytical approaches, and limitations of spatial epidemiology.

Audience: Workshop content is designed for health researchers, with some experience using GIS, who would like to expand their knowledge of spatial epidemiology.

Free

The purpose of this program is to educate nurses about trends in the healthcare industry, to discuss skills nurses can learn to influence change, and to challenge every nurse to become a strong leader and a supportive follower. After studying the information presented here, you will be able to —

• Discuss how nurses can gain control of their own destinies in response to trends affecting the healthcare industry.
• Identify five new skills that will help nurses positively influence change in healthcare organizations.
• Discuss three key characteristics of effective leaders and supportive followers.

Surveys take many different forms and styles. On one extreme there are Face-to-face Interviews when the researcher asks questions individually of each subject or respondent who answers verbally. At the other extreme is the Electronic Questionnaire when all the instructions and questions are on-line and the respondent replies on-line. In the middle we have Telephone Interviews, Group administered and Postal Questionnaires.

The Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS or the Policy) is a joint policy of Canada’s three federal research agencies – the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), or “the Agencies.”

This Policy expresses the Agencies’ continuing commitment to the people of Canada to promote the ethical conduct of research involving humans. It has been informed, in part, by leading international ethics norms, all of which may help, in some measure, to guide Canadian researchers, in Canada and abroad, in the conduct of research involving humans.

This edition represents the first substantive change to the Policy since its adoption in 1998. It is a major revision, reflecting over a decade of experience in the application of the Policy by the research community to existing and emerging ethical issues and new areas of research. It also distils the experience of the Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics (PRE or the Panel), which was created in 2001 primarily to steward the evolution and interpretation of this Policy, and to provide the Agencies with independent advice on issues related to the ethics of research involving humans. This edition, which replaces the original TCPS, draws on the advice provided to the Panel by its working groups and committees. As well, it reflects the significant and valuable input from the research community and all those who provided feedback on the drafts that the Panel circulated publicly in December 2008 and December 2009.

Consider the "Friday Evening Scenario": the research proposal evaluator is on his/her desk, it's Friday evening and the pile of proposals is huge. Read what makes a proposal readable, how to grab and keep the reviewers attention and how to increase your chances of getting funded.

Course Summary
Ideal for those involved in planning or implementing technology in health care and who want to better understand terminologies. This course covers foundational concepts for pan-Canadian reference terminologies like LOINC, SNOMED CT and UCUM. Learn strategies and lessons learned during implementation, and how to handle business processes such as change management and mapping.

Course Features:

• Six online modules with recorded presentations that can be viewed at your own leisure (Approximately 3.5 hours in total)
• Presentation material and other helpful resources for ongoing reference
• Online quizzes
• Subject matter experts to answer course questions

Welcome to Testing Treatments interactive
 

• How do you know whether one treatment is better than another, or whether the evidence about a treatment’s benefits and harms is reliable?
• Does current research address what you want to know? If not, what can you do to make treatment research more relevant to you?

Testing Treatments interactive (TTi) is for patients, health professionals and anyone else who is interested in these questions.

It will help you to understand the importance of having fair tests of the effects of treatments, and how you can help make them a reality.

And if you tell us what you think via our User Survey, you might win a signed copy of the Second Edition of Testing Treatments.

Summaries of Application-Writing Tips

The following tips and insights are intended to assist applicants in writing a successful CIHR application, from the planning stages through writing and finalization.

Empower Yourself: Be Prepared!

• Assess your Readiness to Apply
• Review the Funding Opportunity for Critical Information
• Don’t Wait Until the Last Minute

Application Content: Success is in the Details

• Read the Instructions Carefully (and be prepared to follow them exactly!)
• Address the Evaluation Criteria
• Substantiate your Claims
• Include Gender and Sex in your Research Design (when appropriate)
• Justify your Team Composition
• Address your Project’s Limitations
• Justify your Budget Request
• Address Previous Reviews with Respect

Writing and Finalizing

• Engage your Audience: Write with the Reviewer in Mind
• Summaries are More Important than you Might Think
• Have your Application Pre-Reviewed

Writing proposals for research funding is a peculiar facet of North American academic culture, and as with all things cultural, its attributes rise only partly into public consciousness. A proposal's overt function is to persuade a committee of scholars that the project shines with the three kinds of merit all disciplines value, namely, conceptual innovation, methodological rigor, and rich, substantive content. But to make these points stick, a proposal writer needs a feel for the unspoken customs, norms, and needs that govern the selection process itself. These are not really as arcane or ritualistic as one might suspect. For the most part, these customs arise from the committee's efforts to deal in good faith with its own problems: incomprehension among disciplines, work overload, and the problem of equitably judging proposals that reflect unlike social and academic circumstances.

PowerPoint presentation on writing academic essays.

Welcome to the companion website for The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project by Zina O'Leary.

In this website you will find information for students and lecturers to help you use the book and get the most from your own research project or that of your students.

This website contains:

• Video blogs from the author herself offering insights and key tips into the research project process.
• Chapter-by-chapter powerpoint slides to aid teaching and revision.
• Lists of further reading to help you find out more about the research process and locate examples of research in action.
• Timelines that summarise the typical unfolding of a research project.

The focus group is a technique for eliciting information from specific population subgroups.
Issues addressed may be little known or relatively well known to the researcher. The method is most effectively used when the objective of the investigation is to elicit points of view of client or consumer groups which may differ from those of providers. Despite the frequency with which focus groups are used, few published materials describe the practical application of the method.

This paper presents a detailed methodology for the conduct of focus groups and analysis of focus group data with the intention of improving its use among researchers and health-care professionals. Data from two studies, immunization compliance in West Africa, and barriers to use of prenatal-care services in Bolivia, are used as illustrative examples.

A one-hour documentary broadcast by BBC, where Hans Rosling says there’s nothing boring about stats, and then goes on to prove it. 
 

What is a review of the literature?

A literature review is an account of what has been published on a topic by accredited scholars and researchers. Occasionally you will be asked to write one as a separate assignment (sometimes in the form of an annotated bibliography—see the bottom of the next page), but more often it is part of the introduction to an essay, research report, or thesis. In writing the literature review, your purpose is to convey to your reader what knowledge and ideas have been established on a topic, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. As a piece of writing, the literature review must be defined by a guiding concept (e.g., your research objective, the problem or issue you are discussing, or your argumentative thesis). It is not just a descriptive list of the material available, or a set of summaries

The Logic Model process is a tool that has been used for more than 20 years by program managers and evaluators
to describe the effectiveness of their programs. The model describes logical linkages among program resources, activities, outputs, audiences, and short-, intermediate-, and long-term outcomes related to a specific problem or situ-
ation. Once a program has been described in terms of the logic model, critical measures of performance can be iden-
tified(outcome). Further, the model helps to identify partner-ships critical to enhancing our performance.

Key Messages
• Lack of time, research interpretation skills and patience for jargon stops practitioners from putting research into practice in their daily work.
• Before putting research into use in their own practice, practitioners would ideally like to see pilot tests of new approaches that are straightforward and affordable to emulate.
• Health promotion stakeholders suggest a central agency, such as a government health department, should become the main resource to fund, collect, summarize and promote promising research findings in a format that appeals to practitioners.

There is a way of understanding how much modern medicine has to offer individual patients. It is a simple statistical concept called the “Number-Needed-to-Treat”, or for short the ‘NNT’. The NNT offers a measurement of the impact of a medicine or therapy by estimating the number of patients that need to be treated in order to have an impact on one person. The concept is statistical, but intuitive, for we know that not everyone is helped by a medicine or intervention — some benefit, some are harmed, and some are unaffected. The NNT tells us how many of each.

There are six videos in this playlist from a lecture by Graham R Gibbs on doing a research interview.

CORE provides an applied approach to the guidance provided in TCPS 2. This self-paced course is a media-rich learning experience that features interactive exercises and multi-disciplinary examples. CORE consists of eight modules ranging from Core Principles to REB Review. It is designed primarily for the use of researchers and REB members – though anyone may take this course and print their own certificate of completion.

How often do you see a news story announcing some sort of new scientific discovery and think, 'how can they have proved that it can't be true?'. This entry attempts to explain some things you should think about before deciding whether to believe a new medical discovery.

This article reviews the growing body of research on clinical judgment in nursing and presents an alternative model of clinical judgment based on these studies. Based on a review of nearly 200 studies, five conclusions can be drawn: (1) Clinical judgments are more influenced by what nurses bring to the situation than the objective data about the situation at hand; (2) Sound clinical judgment
rests to some degree on knowing the patient and his or her typical pattern of responses, as well as an engagement with the patient and his or her concerns; (3) Clinical judgments are influenced by the context in which the situation occurs and the culture of the nursing care unit; (4) Nurses use a variety of reasoning patterns alone or in combination; and (5) Reflection on practice is often triggered by a
breakdown in clinical judgment and is critical for the development of clinical knowledge and improvement in clinical reasoning. A model based on these general conclusions emphasizes the role of nurses’ background, the context of the situation, and nurses’ relationship with their patients
as central to what nurses notice and how they interpret findings, respond, and reflect on their response.

Not all science or research is created equal. Some research is likely to hold more weight than other research. Researchers and academics often recognize quality research readily, while others — even other professionals such as doctors and clinicians — may struggle with understanding the value of any given journal article.

The intent of this article is to provide some basic tips on reading research reports. I will assume you already have at a least a basic understanding of different methods and statistical procedures used in analyzing research data. (In order to maximize the benefits of reading a research report it is important to have at least a basic understanding of research methods and statistics.)

OUTLINE -------------------

1. Top Tips (Dr. Allison Morehead)
2. Backgrounder: OGS, SSHRC and CIHR
3. Common Errors
4. Grantsmanship – what’s important

Creating Research Summaries

This KMb Tool Kit describes the process undertaken to develop clear language research summaries.

Using a common template, research summaries were developed by the KMb Unit at York University to capture the results and impacts of research. These summaries communicate the key messages of research findings in a simple and effective format. Summaries were written by York students and staff trained in clear language writing and design principles, and were approved by the researchers. Approved summaries were then posted onto www.researchimpact.ca into a searchable database.

These tools are intended to:

• Help you use research evidence in decision making
• Help public health organizations document and share lessons learned
• Be modified and adapted for use in your health unit

These tools were developed and field tested in collaboration with Canadian public health units.

Downloadable versions of the tools are available by clicking on the link(s) 'Download this tool'. You are welcome to adapt these tools for use in your health unit. Please acknowledge health-evidence.ca for developing the original version of any tool(s) that you adapt. You will find how to cite the tool at the bottom of each document.

Many undergraduates and qualified nurses who have returned to study do a literature review as the final part of their degree. Helen Aveyard’s advice will ease the process and make it more enjoyable

Extracts from a lecture by Graham R Gibbs about the issues surrounding transcribing qualitative data such as interviews and a discussion of different ways to transcribe.

CORE provides an applied approach to the guidance provided in TCPS 2. This self-paced course is a media-rich learning experience that features interactive exercises and multi-disciplinary examples. CORE consists of eight modules ranging from Core Principles to REB Review. It is designed primarily for the use of researchers and REB members – though anyone may take this course and print their own certificate of completion.

This tutorial is designed to help you learn the principles of citing and referencing, and understand how to avoid plagiarising when integrating source material. This tutorial will take you approximately 20 minutes to complete.

The information and activities in this tutorial are designed to introduce you to the “what, why and how” of acknowledging your sources. The tutorial is not intended to teach you how to use specific referencing styles, or to imply that any given style should be adopted. Always use the referencing style recommended by your own department – and if unsure, ask your lecturer. Throughout the tutorial author-date examples are given in APA style and footnote examples are given in Chicago style.

CINAHL is the Cumulative Index to Nursing & Allied Health Literature database. This database provides authoritative coverage of the journal literature related to nursing and allied health, including physical therapy, occupational therapy, physician assistant, and other fields. Indexing is also provided for healthcare books (including the publications of the American Nurses Association and the National League for Nursing), nursing dissertations, selected conference proceedings, standards of professional practice, educational software, and audiovisual materials, along with selected journals in the areas of consumer health, biomedicine, and health sciences librarianship.

The first article in this series on understanding research (Lee, 2006a) examined the basic terminology used by researchers and identified that qualitative research produced non-numerical (qualitative) data. This type of research aims to report a situation as it actually is in a natural rather than a laboratory setting.

Qualitative researchers justify this approach by suggesting that it is not possible to separate the context or setting in which the phenomenon occurs from the phenomenon itself
 

This guide was developed to support individuals and organisations collecting and using, or planning to collect and use, personal outcomes data. Personal outcomes data refers to information gathered from people supported by health and social services and their unpaid carers about what’s important to them in their lives and the ways in which they would like to be supported. An outcomes-focused approach
represents a shift in the way services are designed and delivered by putting the person at the centre of the support they receive. The approach calls for a focus on gathering, using and integrating qualitative (eg narrative, personal stories) as well as quantitative (eg numbers, statistics) data which can be challenging.  

Video Series:

How to Calculate an Odds Ratio - 5:47

Understanding a Confidence Interval - 5:13

Forest Plots: Understanding a Meta-Analysis in 5 Minutes or Less - 5:31

The Importance of Clinical Significance - 3:34

Knowing how to understand and use statistics is vital for informed decision-making. This is why the ABS is committed to increasing the level of statistical literacy in the community. This section contains a variety of tools and resources to assist you to understand, interpret and evaluate statistical information.

The purpose of this checklist is to provide support for program evaluators who design, develop, implement, and disseminate evaluations. This checklist is designed to assist you in including people of all ages and abilities in your evaluation process. It was adapted from the seven principles of Universal Design developed by North Carolina State University, The Center for Universal Design (http://www.ncsu.edu/www/ncsu/design/sod5/cud/index.htm). The Adaptive Environments Center© (www.adaptenv.org) states “Universal design asks from the outset how to make the design work beautifully and seamlessly for as many people as possible. It seeks to consider the breadth of human diversity across the lifespan to create design solutions that work for all users”. This checklist was developed for a Skill Building Session at Evaluation 2010.

Department of Art & Design:

Plan, create and produce a poster to enage the viewer and communicate your knowledge
and passion about your research

• consider visual conventions of your field/discipline, but also consider viewer’s needs
• consider graphic design principles

Data handling in SPSS 18 (aka PASW 18)

• SPSS Practical - Part 1: Setting up SPSS and initial files [PDF] (17 pages).
• SPSS Practical - Part 2: Creating new variables [PDF] (10 pages).
• SPSS Practical - Part 3: Adding data to a data file; summary and sources of further information [PDF] (12 pages).
• Zipped data files for practical (76 KB, expands to 214 KB unzipped)

Data handling in NVivo 9
Practical version 4, August 2011
by Dr. Aikaterini Chatsiou (UK Data Archive)

• NVivo Practical - Introduction [PDF] (9 pages).
• NVivo Practical - Unit 1: Preparing your Qualitative data for use in NVivo9 [PDF] (19 pages).
• NVivo Practical - Unit 2: Managing your data when working in NVivo 9[PDF] (19 pages).
• NVivo Practical - Unit 3: Managing your data at the end of your project [PDF] (16 pages).
• Zipped data files for practical. (13.1 MB expands to 32.2 MB unzipped)

Data handling in R
Practical version 3, August 2011
by Dr. Duncan Smallman

• R Practical - Introduction [PDF] (2 pages).
• R Practical - Exercise 1 [PDF] (26 pages).
• R Practical - Exercise 2 [PDF] (14 pages).
• R Practical - Exercise 3 [PDF] (5 pages).
• Zipped data files for practical (481 KB, expands to 1.6 MB unzipped)

A General Guide for Postgraduate Research Students

There is no one single correct method to writing a literature review. Therefore, this resource is a guide only. Check with your supervisor/lecturer/school to ascertain whether there are any specific requirements for your literature review before proceeding.

What is a Literature Review?

A literature review is an examination of the research that has been conducted in a particular field of study. Hart (1998) defines it as:

• The selection of available documents (both published and unpublished) on the topic, which contain information, ideas, data and evidence. [This selection is] written from a particular standpoint to fulfil certain aims or express certain views on the nature of the topic and how it is to be investigated, and
• The effective evaluation of these documents in relation to the research being proposed (p. 13).

What is the Purpose of a Literature Review?

• To demonstrate your scholarly ability to identify relevant information and to outline existing knowledge.
• To identify the 'gap' in the research that your study is attempting to address, positioning your work in the context of previous research and creating a 'research space' for your work.
• To evaluate and synthesise the information in line with the concepts that you have set yourself for the research.
• To produce a rationale or justification for your study.

Summary
The aim of this toolkit is to help you plan properly for sending your interview/focus group recordings to somebody else for transcribing, and save you time by helping you do this more efficiently.

It covers:

• budgeting for transcribing costs (see our cost calculator spreadsheet too)
• choosing a good transcriber
• managing the administrative side of the transcription process
• improving recording quality for accurate transcripts
• help with formatting transcripts
• ethical considerations, and
• checking your transcript

The purpose of the EBN process is to help you as a professional make informed decisions by learning from what others in your field are researching and learning. Using these set steps makes it easier to apply current quality evidence from research in clinical and healthcare decisions.

This website and the resources listed will help to guide you through the 5 steps of the EBN process.

Other researchers tell me I should patent my method for analyzing qualitative data. It’s simple to set up, easy to use, and allows one to manage a moderate amount of data (up to 10 focus groups) in one file. With a basic working knowledge of Excel, you can do it too.

I’ve been using an Excel spreadsheet to organize focus group and interview data for analysis for several years. It’s a nice compromise between the manual “cut-and-paste” method and commercial software like Atlas or NUD*IST.

To be clear, no system—Atlas, NUD*IST, or Excel—can analyze the data for you, no matter how expensive or sophisticated it is. It takes a human brain to do that. But, unless you’re conducting a large, multiple investigator research study that produces a ton of data, Excel does a fine job of organizing nonnumerical data for analysis.

This resource has been authored by David Whigham, Senior Lecturer in Economics at Glasgow Caledonian University.

The workbooks contain instructions and practical examples to help you make the most of using Excel in data analysis.
 

Excel 1: Basic Excel Techniques
Excel 2: Descriptive Statistics
Excel 3: Contingency Tables (Cross Tabulation)
Excel 4: Charting and Regression
Excel 5: Inference (Statistical Significance)

Learn how to use Google Scholar, your gateway to scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals, patents, court opinions, etc.

Brief overview in using libraries for health research.

We queried a half-dozen aficionados of video abstracts for advice on how to make a video worthy of the red carpet. This is what they told us.

Keep it simple. Don’t get stymied by thinking you need animations, clever edits and shots of your research site – all of which will, admittedly, make your video more dynamic. A laptop with a built-in camera and a quiet space are all you require to create a video that will garner viewers on YouTube. “Something is better than nothing,” notes University of Calgary physicist Barry Sanders(see his article on the topic and his video abstract).

Kyle T. of Veritas Tutors in Cambridge, MA, discusses the more advanced versions of the basic analysis of variance (AnoVa) and introduces the Factorial AnoVa as the way to test groups with more than one categorial variable. He explains how this test expands upon the basic AnoVA and describes the three different types of Factorial AnoVa that can be conducted.

Webcast:  6 minutes

Focus group studies are increasingly published in health related journals, but we know little about how researchers use this method, particularly how they determine the number of focus groups to conduct. The methodological literature commonly advises researchers to follow principles of data saturation, although practical advise on how to do this is lacking. Our objectives were firstly, to describe the current status of sample size in focus group studies reported in health journals. Secondly, to assess whether and how researchers explain the number of focus groups they carry out.
 

This video is from the 4th ESRC Research Methods Festival (5-8 July 2010, Oxford), organised by the National Centre for Research Methods.

There has been an increasing interest in research ethics over the last decade or so in the light of the increasing ethical regulation of social research. Enhancing 'ethical literacy' means encouraging researchers to understand and engage with ethical issues as they emerge throughout the process of research. This book offers a short, succinct and accessible overview of the field. Wiles clearly identifies the key issues that researchers are likely to face, and the everyday ethical dilemmas that researchers encounter in a range of different contexts. The book covers a broad range of methods with clear guidance for researchers on how to identify an approach that fits with their moral and intellectual framework. It explores ethical issues relating to 'traditional' research methods as well as those relating to new and emerging methods and approaches, particularly visual and online methods.

This video is from the 4th ESRC Research Methods Festival (5-8 July 2010, Oxford), organised by the National Centre for Research Methods

Program evaluation is the systematic assessment of the processes and/or outcomes of a program with the intent of furthering its development and improvement.

Since 2005, the Institute has published a regular column called, "What researchers mean by..." in our newsletter, At Work. The column is designed to help readers better understand what researchers do and the language they use when reporting their findings.

Review what's new in the Canadian Common CV application for previous CCV users.

Webcast:  7:20 minutes

Scientific authors who pay to publish their articles in an open-access publication should be congratulated for doing so. They also should be aware that they may not be getting full open access from some publications that charge for publication under the “open access” label. Two features define an open-access publication: (1) the published contents are freely accessible through the Internet, and (2) readers are given copyright permission (see Box 1) to republish or reuse the content as they like so long as the author and publisher receive proper attribution [1]. Recently, some publications have begun offering an open-access option that charges for Internet publication without granting readers full reuse rights, such as Springer's Open Choice or Nature's Scientific Reports. These publishers have adopted a business model through which authors pay for immediate publication on the Internet but the publisher nonetheless keeps commercial reuse rights for itself. This is not full open access (see Box 2).

Helping people find meaning in large, complex datasets is becoming an increasingly important consideration in UX design. While the need may be clear, the steps of transforming unprocessed data into effective visualizations are not always so apparent. Data are of various distinctive types, and different data types lend themselves more naturally to certain kinds of visual representation than to others. In addition, some visualization designs are more effective than others in summarizing and highlighting various characteristics of data. How do you assess and assemble all of the disparate elements in the most informative way? At least for me, the more familiar I become with different data types and their related depictions, the more confident I feel in applying and exploring visualization design ideas.

Evaluation and measurement are essential tools to respond to the growing demand for accountability
and “proof of concept” in the non-profit sector. At the same time, non-profits are embracing the concept
of evaluation as a tool that increases program effectiveness. In an effort to make evaluation tools more accessible, the Paloma Foundation and Wellesley Institute partnered to develop a participatory program evaluation guide for nonprofit organizations that describes how to undertake a program evaluation using a participatory process. 

An important part of the work completed in academia is sharing our scholarship with others. This communication takes place when we present at scholarly conferences, publish in peer-reviewed journals, and publish in books. This OWL resource addresses the steps in writing that begin these projects that should, when working correctly, lead to scholarly inquiry and communication benefiting the individual researcher as well as her discipline.

For samples of conference proposals, article abstracts and proposals, and book proposals, select the Sample Proposals file in the Media box above.
 

Focus and Scope

Writing in the Health Sciences: A Comprehensive Guide is based on the unique program of writing instruction conducted by the Health Sciences Writing Centre in the Health Sciences and Social Work Faculties at the University of Toronto, Canada’s largest university.

The Guide is written for

• students at universities and colleges who are studying in any discipline within the health professions, from the narrowly biomedical to the broadly sociocultural
• graduate students who are conducting and reporting on research through thesis writing, conference papers or posters, and publication
• faculty who are teaching in any Health Sciences and Social Work discipline in a university or college setting
• health professionals and researchers seeking to improve their professional writing