Learn Research Skills

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 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.

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

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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.
  

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.
  

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.

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.

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 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
    

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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
  

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
    

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.

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.
  

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.

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

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.

Description

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

Tutorial outlining smart general research strategies.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.