Zeros in on Healthcare and Nursing Issues.

¶ … zeros in on healthcare and nursing issues. Can a study have one or more purpose, question, and hypothesis? This paper answers that question through the critique of two scholarly papers; one was published in the peer-reviewed Orthopaedic Nursing and the second one was found in Medical Education.

"Improving Patient Care Through the Use of Research"

In this article the author presents scenarios that address the need for research in nursing care -- that is, the need to solve a problem or find a solution that may save a life or at least ease a patient's suffering. The author uses several questions and several generalized hypothesizes and indeed there are several purposes to this research article. These aspects are needed in the interest of thoroughness. The article point to several approaches to finding appropriate medical answers for nursing questions, but as a rule, an answer cannot be located by simply asking another nurse, or from brainstorming with several nurses. This is because problem solving based on tradition (what has always been done) can in many cases miss new and better medical solutions that can only be found in the scholarly literature.

In his approach Professor Winifred Pinch poses a number of questions -- all of which call for appropriate research. But there is a catch to doing research, because: a) policies and procedures that have evolved over time aren't necessarily up-to-date with the newest and most helpful data and research; in other words, research articles that are five or ten years old may not be applicable; b) a nurse must take the time to approach a "research utilization" solution which requires "dedication and determination"; and c) there are eight steps that need to be taken by nurses in order to locate, understand, and disseminate the results of the most up-to-date research available on any given healthcare topic (Pinch, 2001, p. 80).

"Description, justification and clarification…"

In this article the authors are putting forth a "…framework for classifying the purposes of education research," and at the same time they are quantifying the purposes of research (Cook, et al., 2008, p. 128). Utilizing 105 articles relating to medical education, this article uses three research questions ("What was done?" "Did it work?" And "Why or how did it work?"). The point of the research relates to clarification and understanding of medical education sources.

The article has more than one hypothesis, more than one research purpose and more than one (three) research questions. Of course a study can have more than one of each because when dealing with myriad research papers -- which offer a wide and deep field of subjects and interests -- the enterprising scholars who do the digging are certain to find there is no one solution, there is no one question or hypothesis that can bring clarity to the problem in terms of a nurse's need to focus on solutions.

The authors carefully reviewed the 105 articles (out of 1,459 available peer-reviewed articles published in the years 2003 and 2004) and found that 75% of them were "justification studies," 16% were studies that simply described issues, and 13 used clarification strategies (Cook, 128). What the authors believe is that while "clarification" studies are relatively rare, they are needed in order to "…deepen our understanding" and advance the "…art and science of medical education" (Cook, 128). That said, on page 132 the authors insist they are not asking for fewer "description or justification" studies and yet these categories of studies, as a rule, "…have a limited impact on our understanding of the teaching and learning process" (Cook, 132).