Succeeding in Literature Reviews and Research Project Plans for Nursing Students

Graham R. Williamson, Andrew Whittaker

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526476289, 9781526476265
• eBook ISBN: 9781526476296
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Nursing

Now in it?s fourth edition and thoroughly updated to ensure all content is mapped to the new 2018 NMC standards, this book is a practical and readable guide to undertaking a research project plan or a literature review for final year assessment. The book guides readers from start to finish, beginning with choosing a nursing topic and developing questions about it, then accessing and critically reviewing research literature, considering ethical issues, proposing research where applicable, and finally, writing up and completing the literature review or research proposal. The authors also explore how to translate evidence into practice and how this can improve day to day decision-making, as well as feeding into assessments.

Section 1 Getting started

Chapter 1 Getting started on your final-year project

Chapter aims

After reading this chapter, you should have developed an understanding of these areas:

• nursing and research;
• an overview of literature reviews, project plans and dissertations;
• key terms in research;
• an introduction to quantitative and qualitative research paradigms and mixed methods approaches;
• research designs from particular traditions (including action research, evaluation research, participatory and emancipatory research, case studies);
• research attitude.

Introduction

You are about to embark upon a process that is likely to change the way you think. You will gain tools for challenging your own thinking and the thinking of others and get a glimpse ‘behind the scenes’ at how knowledge is created. As a result, you are likely to experience more freedom than with any other part of the course for intensive study of a topic that interests you.

Historically, nursing has seen itself as a ‘practical’ subject and has drawn upon other disciplines to provide a research base to inform its interventions. Medicine, sociology, psychology and biology have been the disciplines that have been the most influential; all of these have relatively well-established research bases. As nursing has evolved as a discipline and is now an all-graduate profession at NHS Band 5, there has been a shift towards developing nursing’s own research base.

The use of evidence to inform professional nursing practice (as opposed to looking after people based on custom-and-practice or tradition) is now widely established as essential (Ellis, 2016). Thus developing an understanding of research and related concepts such as literature searching and ethics is an important part of the pre-registration nursing degree, usually occurring in the later course years. So you will have become accustomed to traditional academic writing and competence-based assessments such as placement portfolios; however, the prospect of learning a new vocabulary and set of skills can be a little daunting. For example, although all students must demonstrate numerical proficiency before qualifying, this may not translate into confidence in critically appraising statistical information. Even the language of research design, methodology and data analysis can seem technical and remote from students’ experiences.

Activity 1.1 Reflection

Take a sheet of blank paper. Think of the term ‘research’ and jot down any ideas that occur to you.

Take a separate sheet of paper and jot down the emotions provoked by the idea of engaging in research.

As this is a personal reflective activity, there is no outline answer at the end of the chapter.

Some students find that a lot of negative emotions are forthcoming. Reinforcing negative emotions by going over them repeatedly will not help you to overcome them. It is very important that these are supplanted by some positives, so try the following: visualise yourself successfully completing your dissertation or module assignment, handing it in and getting a really good mark. How good would that feel? Next, think about how much you want to be a nurse – hopefully quite a lot at this stage of your programme. This is one module or assignment that is between you and your goal of becoming a nurse but it is achievable; thousands of students do something similar every year. Visualise yourself at your graduation, in your best clothes, with your friends and family clapping as you receive your certificate. Return to this imagery if things get tough when you are writing. You now have a positive goal in sight rather than negative emotions, and successfully completing your dissertation is just part of that.

For many nurses, ‘research’ is something that is either intimidating or boring – perhaps both. It is done by other people, such as psychologists or doctors, using highly complex and technical procedures. We hope to challenge these myths throughout this book and demonstrate to you that research is something that can be interesting and straightforward. For nurses, the point of research is not as a purely academic exercise but rather about how it contributes to improvements in everyday nursing practice and patient care. This is reflected in the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) Standards for Pre-registration Nursing Education (NMC, 2018) as well as the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA, 2001) subject benchmarks for nursing, listed in the Introduction. While few nursing students will undertake a piece of research as a final-year project, many will be asked to undertake a literature review, often in conjunction with a research proposal. This book therefore focusses on these aspects: it is about understanding and doing literature reviews and applying research concepts to proposal writing, rather than about research per se.

The purpose of such extended pieces of work is that they provide an opportunity to explore and develop key, transferable academic skills such as project management, analysis and synthesis, and critiquing and developing a deeper understanding of research and evidence to underpin practice.

By reviewing the literature in an area, you will also gain in-depth knowledge of a topic that you are interested in from the practice setting. As an overview, undertaking a literature review involves an exhaustive search and retrieval exercise using a systematic process of:

• searching electronic databases using key words;
• specifying criteria for the retrieval of articles from the search;
• using critical appraisal to examine the articles’ strengths and weaknesses, usually against some agreed criteria;
• synthesis of the literature to uncover some insights (possibly new ones) as evidenced by this body of knowledge.

An important development in nursing and healthcare in this field is that of systematic reviews and meta-analyses. This usually applies to quantitative work, although there are qualitative, narrative approaches to it. We explore these concepts more fully in Chapter 8.

Writing a project proposal will be useful and you will gain from the experience because, as well as requiring you to understand research concepts more fully and plan a coherent study, it may inform future studies such as a Master’s degree. You will also be addressing the professional standards listed in the Introduction and these in turn will influence your patient care when you are qualified.

Research project proposals need to include a summary of the literature on the topic you have chosen. This summary may or may not need to be sourced in a systematic review, but it will need to contain a background and rationale for the proposal and some idea about how the existing literature informs your study. You will need to have a research question, a sentence with a question mark at the end, as well as aims and objectives. Ensure that these are achievable and not too ambitious! You will probably be asked to write about your underlying approach, whether qualitative or quantitative. You would then develop an outline of how you intend to conduct the study, indicating what methods of data collection and analysis you will use (this is why we spend time below outlining some of the different ways in which this can be understood), as well as a timetable, resources and plan for dissemination of the findings.

‘Dissertation’ is a term that is applied to some form of extended study, usually undertaken as part of an academic award. For our purposes, it can denote a third-year piece of work, with an element of choice involved. Dissertations do not usually take an essay format, in which students are asked to answer a question; rather, they require students to choose an area of practice of their own interest and explore that in some way. A dissertation would normally have some element of research in it, and the term is most frequently associated with a research project where data collection and analysis are carried out, although this is not common in nursing courses. In nursing, a dissertation could be a project where literature is reviewed and conclusions and recommendations drawn, and may include a research proposal. You may not even have a ‘dissertation module’; if you do have one, be careful to write following the structure requirements given at your institution. As it is usually worth more than the normal number of credits it is perhaps 5,000 words or longer, and will involve an element of critical appraisal, analysis and synthesis.

Transferable skills

Completing your project will provide you with the following range of transferable skills:

• project management skills, from first conception through to completion. These include time management and planning skills as well as evaluation and implementation skills;
• the ability to find and begin to critically evaluate research studies, rather than accepting them at face value. This can lead to increased confidence to question your own practice and the practice of others;
• the ability to think and study independently and take responsibility for your own learning as an autonomous practitioner. This can lead to increased curiosity and openness to new ideas.

These are all essential skills that will increase your employability and positively improve your practice.

Professional development and reflective practice

Great emphasis is placed on developing skills of reflection about, in and on practice. This has developed over many years in nursing. It is important also that you reflect on practice.

Developing a questioning approach that looks in a critical way at how you approach the research task and seeks to heighten your skills will help you to refine your practice and deepen your understanding of research concepts. Reflection is central to good nursing practice, but only if action results from that reflection.

Reflecting about, in and on your practice is not only important during your nurse preparation programme; it is considered key to continuing professional development. As we move to a profession that acknowledges lifelong learning as a way of keeping up to date, ensuring that research informs practice and honing skills and values for practice, it is important to begin the process at the outset of your development. This is reinforced by the professional standards discussed in the Introduction.

The role of research in your projects

We will now look over the key terms and approaches in research, some of which you may have come across before, to help you recall these prior to starting on your project. Although you may not be working with all these methods within your course, you will need to be familiar with them, and their application in nursing, in order to complete a research proposal or plan, and to assess literature as part of your literature review.

Future chapters will look at each of these in more detail to enable you to select the most appropriate methods for your research proposal. So consider the notes below as a ‘refresher’, which we will then go on to cover in more detail and relate more closely to study design. We have begun by asking you to reflect upon your initial thoughts about engaging in research. Below, you will be introduced to key terms. The distinction between quantitative and qualitative approaches will be discussed. You will be asked to consider a range of research designs from particular traditions to illustrate the wide diversity of approaches.

Key terms in research

As with any new area of study, you need to understand new terminology that can seem technical and confusing. Here are a few key terms that you will come across when studying for, and considering the design of, your research proposal or project. There is considerable debate about the exact use of specific terms, but the definitions below are generally agreed upon and are the meanings that are used in this book.

Data refers to the information that you are going to collect in order to answer your research question; for example, the words used by your interview participants or numerical information from your questionnaires. Strictly speaking, data is a plural rather than a singular noun (the singular is ‘datum’) and this conventi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the authors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 Getting started
• Chapter 1 Getting started on your final-year project
• Section 2 Planning and preparing for your final-year project
• Chapter 2 Planning and undertaking a literature review
• Chapter 3 Planning your research proposal or dissertation
• Section 3 Using and critiquing research for your final-year project
• Chapter 4 Using and critiquing qualitative research methods: interviews and focus groups
• Chapter 5 Analysing qualitative data
• Chapter 6 Using and critiquing research methods: surveys and experimental designs
• Chapter 7 Analysing quantitative data and understanding basic statistics
• Chapter 8 Using and critiquing systematic reviews and meta-analyses
• Chapter 9 Translating evidence into practice
• Section 4 Writing and finishing
• Chapter 10 Writing up your literature review
• Chapter 11 Writing your research proposal and dissertation
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• References
• Index