Research Skills

Jeremy Jolley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317905448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Do you need to conduct or understand research to support your studies or evidence-based practice in healthcare? Ensure that you have all the research tools at your finger tips with this quick reference guide covering both quantitative and qualitative research.

Definitions

What is Research?

Research is any enquiry that is systematic in its nature and which seeks to ensure that the results of that enquiry can be judged by others to be beyond criticism.

Research involves the collection and analysis of ‘data’. Data can exist as numbers, words, pictures and anything else that can be collected and subjected to analysis.

The elements of research can be found in everyday life and in clinical practice. We ‘research’ the market when we buy a new TV or car, or when we try to find out about a disease or treatment that is new to us. Research in the context of this book is fundamentally different from these daily activities only in that:

• The way we go about the research (the design and the method) is identified.

• The way we interpret or analyse the data is documented.

• We document the above expressly so that others can critique our work and so that we can convince them that our research can be trusted (i.e. it is ‘robust’).

So, research:

• Is systematic. Data is collected and analysed using a stated method; that method is not ad hoc, it does not use trial and error.

• Involves the collection of data. The data can be new data, data which already exists or data that someone else has used in their research but the data is always ‘raw’. Raw data is original data, not summaries of data.

A library search and a literature review are not research because they do not seek to find raw data.

The Purpose of Research

• To generate new knowledge

• To enable a new interpretation of existing data

Evidence-Based Practice (EBP)

This is a broader term than ‘research’. EBP is an acknowledgement that:

• Clinical practice must sometimes take place even where research is not available.

• There are ‘other’ (non-research) forms of evidence which do have value.

Acceptable forms of non-research evidence

Peer review	Allows for a formal process whereby fellow professionals can review ideas for practice development
Clinical audit	A process by which practice can be met against defined standards
Benchmarking	Where practice can be mapped against agreed definitions of best practice – often between different institutions
Established clinical expertise	Is valuable, especially where success and failure rates are known
Tradition	What practitioners have always done may be flawed but is still likely to be effective
Policy and guidelines	Have been subject to careful planning and peer review
Anecdotal evidence	Evidence that does not meet the criteria for ‘research’ but can still be documented and subjected to review

Non-acceptable forms of evidence

Intuition	Intuition is an unreasoned belief in something (a feeling that x = y). Evidence for this belief cannot be provided by the individual and cannot be shared with others
Trial and error	Is haphazard, non-systematic and difficult to record and report to others
Unpublished work (including unpublished research)	Has not been made subject to peer review

The Knowledge Hierarchy

1. Research

2. Benchmarking or audit against evidence-based criteria

3. Policy and guidelines supported by evidence

4. Tradition a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Definitions