WEEK 2

APPLICATION EXERCISES DIRECTIONS:

  1. Below is a brief abstract of a fictitious study, followed by a critique. Do you agree with the critique? Why or why not?

Fictitious Study: Forester (2000) prepared the following abstract for her study.

Family members often experience considerable anxiety while their loved ones are in surgery. This study examined the effectiveness of a nursing intervention that involved providing oral intraoperative progress reports to family members. Surgical patients undergoing elective procedures were selected to either have family members receive the intervention or to not have them receive it. The findings indicated that the family members in the intervention group were less anxious than family members who received the usual care.

Critique: This brief abstract provides a general overview of the nature of Forester’s study. It indicates a rationale for the study (the high anxiety level of surgical patients’ family members) and summarizes what the researcher did. However, the abstract could well have provided more information while still staying within a 200-word guideline (the abstract only contains 77 words). For example, the abstract could have better described the nature of the intervention (e.g., at what point during the operation was information given to family members? How much detail was provided? Etc). For a reader to have a preliminary assessment of the worth of the study---and therefore to make a decision about whether to read the entire report---more information about the methods would also have been helpful. For example, the abstract should have indicated such methodological features as how the researcher measured anxiety and how many surgical patients were in the sample. Some indication of the study’s implications would also have enhanced the usefulness of the abstract.

  1. Below is an abstract from a fictitious study by Kachidurian (2001). Read the abstract and then respond to the questions that follow.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of water pillows in reducing bilateral head flattening in preterm infants. The sample consisted of 46 healthy infants who were 35 weeks or less gestational age. Half the subjects, at random, received the special intervention, which involved their heads supported on a small water pillow. The other 23 infants received customary care. The dependent variable was infant head shape, assessed using cranial measurements indicative of the roundness or flatness of the head. The two groups of infants had significantly different head measurements: the heads of those in the treatment group maintained a round shape, while those of the other infants became flattened. The findings thus suggest that the use of a small water pillow can help to alleviate bilateral head flattening in preterm infants, although replication of this study is warranted.

Questions:

  1. Was this abstract readily comprehensible, even to readers with limited experience reading research reports?
  2. Did the abstract answer the following questions:
  1. What were the research questions?
  2. What methods did the researcher use to address those questions?
  3. What did the researcher discover?
  4. What are the implications for nursing practice?
  1. Is there any additional information that would have helped readers better understand the main features of the study?