Nursing Research

Research Design
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Institutional Affiliation
Research Design
Introduction
Nursing research helps in enhancing efficiency of quality and safety of patients. Nurses need evidence to implement evidence-based practice. Research equips them with hands-on experience and knowledge which helps them to hypothesize, theorize, structure studies, and collect the relevant evidence to provide better care (Grove & Gray, 2018). The overall aim of nursing research is to improve the standards of care and applications for families and patients. This also implies that it is important that nurses understand the fundamental principles of research so as to understand how to conduct research and apply the findings. Nurses need such knowledge to help in advancing their field, offer better health care, and stay updated. Information literacy skills assist nurses in utilizing research information more efficiently in developing conclusions on health care (Boswell & Cannon, 2018). Understanding, evaluating, and using research helps nurses in promoting evidence-based practice in their careers. Two common types of research are quantitative and qualitative. The two types are important in improving nursing practice, as explored.
Quantitative Research
The nature and approach of quantitative research makes it important in nursing and other fields. It yields reliable findings since it is objective and utilizes statistics in generalizing a finding, making it applicable in different fields (Lee, 2019). Quantitative research also reduces and restructures a problem that is complex to a limited number of variables and seeks to establish how different variables relate, such as establishing a cause-and-effect in circumstances that are highly controlled. Further, it is applied in testing theories and hypotheses, and this achieved by assuming that a sample represents the entire problem. Such features make the method desirable in nursing research where there is a need for reliable findings with negligible biases.
Quantitative research exists in various designs, with the choice of design depending on the nature of study and variables. One such design is the descriptive research, which aims aim describing the current status of the primary variable (Mays & Pope, 2020). Such research projects are designed to enable the research to collect systematic information on a certain phenomenon. The study does not start with a hypothesis, but it is developed once data has been collected. The data is then analyzed and synthesized to test the developed hypothesis. Information is collected systematically by carefully selecting the units which were studied and carefully measuring each of the variables.
Application of quantitative research improves the efficiency and quality of nursing practice. It enables nurses to learn more on illnesses (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2020). Physicians are interested in learning as much as possible on a patient’s illness, and quantitative research helps them in getting the specific information that they want. It also improves healthcare facilities; quantitative research can be used to conduct research among patients on their opinions about the services and infrastructure of the facility, and the feedback collected can be used to address any problem identified. Further, interviewing of healthcare professionals is effectively done through quantitative approaches; such interviews help in collecting data and information on general practices and how patients can be educated on certain phenomenon and such research helps in developing materials which are more compelling.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is also important in nursing as it helps in improving efficiency in practice. It helps in conducting in-depth research on a subject, and qualitative approaches are flexible. This creates room for additional information and data during the study (Portney, 2020). Qualitative research is also conducted based on human experiences and observations, and this helps in understanding the issue under study from the perspective of the respondents. As such, the data collected from the research has a predictive quality and the process is open-ended. Overall, qualitative approaches create industry-related information and insights that are applied in improving nursing care practice efficiency in terms of quality and safety of patients.
Qualitative research is conducted in various designs. One of such is ethnography, which is the most common approach to qualitative design to nursing professionals in research. The design involves the research immersing self in the environment of their target participants so as to understand their cultures, goals, motivations, challenges, themes, and motivations which emerge from the study (Ganapathy, 2016). It was first used in cultural anthropology in which researchers have to immerse themselves within a culture for several years. The approach implies that instead of depending on surveys or interviews, the researcher has to experience the participants’ environment first hand. The feature of the researcher having to immerse themselves within the culture makes this approach interesting and unique.
Notably, all the different designs of qualitative research contribute to improved efficiency of nursing practice in various ways. The most ...