Clinical Practice and Design

¶ … experimental -- the specific design is Randomized Controlled Trial. This was not a cause-probing study but a correlational study. The type of question was related to therapy; it was a rigorous design because it utilized a control group. The type of comparison called for in the research design was pretest-posttest. The comparison strategy was effective in illuminating key relationships, such as the strong correlation between one-on-one RN attention with patients and improved sense of well-being.

The study is unclear as to whether it was cross-sectional or longitudinal; one could interpret it as the former, assuming that measurements were taken at a single point in time; or one might assess it as the latter, assuming that measurements were conducted over a period of time of several months to a year. In either case, it is unclear what the number and timing of data collection points was and so it cannot be said if they were appropriate to the study or not.

Common sense would suggest that the study is longitudinal, as that would seem most appropriate to the design. 4. The steps that the researcher took in designing the study to enhance statistical conclusion validity was to take a random sample (189 participants) and place them in 3 distinct treatment groups. The sample consisted of comparable characteristics in terms of demographics and treatment variables. However, the number of participants could still be deemed too relatively few to be conclusive to any large degree. 5.

To control external factors and intrinsic participant characteristics, the researcher gathered a sample of participants that were demographically similar and who had received the same treatment to that point. The threats to the study's internal validity are possible admittance of more than one independent variable (IV)/cause as well as the maturation threat, which means that patients could experience well-being over time as caused by another factor aside from RN intervention.

Correlation is identified -- but correlation does not equate to causation; still, the conclusion offers the interpretation of the facts thusly: the placebo had the same effect as the intervention -- and what this means is that extra attention from the RN -- one-on-one attention -- is a cause of well-being. 6. Major limitations of the design used are that its statistical conclusion validity may have a low statistical power in spite of.