Quality Improvement Project vs Research Project

Topic 1
This project is a quality improvement project and not a research project because it seeks to improve the quality of care provided to diabetes patients of a particular ethnic background. The point of this project is to better enhance the approach to care that nurses use when it comes to offering health education to Asian Americans who are newly diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. By focusing on culturally tailored diabetes education and providing health education that is customized to fit the needs of this population, nurses can improve their own quality care and thus improve their patients’ quality of life.
Quality improvement is a set of “systematic, data-guided activities designed to bring about immediate improvements in health delivery in particular settings” (Lynn et al., 2007, p. 666). As improving quality of care is a constant aim among health care professionals, quality improvement projects are regularly undertaken by evaluating and obtaining understanding from analyzing the experiences of others.
Research projects are not always geared towards improving quality in a specific way: they can be—after all, research is a part of quality improvement projects—but research projects can also wholly focus on testing a hypothesis or seeking to obtain information about a particular relationship or how variables interact with one another. The aim of research projects is not always specifically tailored to address a particular issue with the intention of improving quality care in that arena. A quality improvement project does have such a specific intention, and that intention has to be defined from the outset so that the whole of the project is oriented towards allowing those involved to work to fulfill that aim.
This project, in which the PICOT focuses on showing whether culturally tailored health education can assist Asian Americans in more effectively addressing the issue of type 2 diabetes, fits into the SQUIRE guidelines because the project adheres to the framework supplied by SQUIRE’s 2.0 (2017) guidelines, which “are intended for reports that describe system level work to improve the quality, safety, and value of healthcare, and used methods to establish that observed outcomes were due to the intervention(s).” By following the framework, this project intends to ensure that the observed outcomes of the project are due to the intervention used—which in this case is the tailoring of health education to the culture of the population observed.
Topic 2
The quantitative method is the best method based on my project questions and data because it offers a way to obtain statistical inferences from the data that can be used to show statistical significance. The qualitative method is helpful for understanding what variables are meaningful among a particular population. The quantitative method is helpful for actually testing those variables to see if there is a significant relationship between the independent variable and the dependent variable. The qualitative method is often used to identify the parameters of a problem. The quantitative method is often used to test the solutions to a problem based on the parameters that have been observed in the past (Creswell, 2013). Quantitative method provides empirical evidence, moreover, that can be used to formulate evidence-based practice approaches that can be directly implemented to improve quality of care in the nurse practitioner setting. Since improving quality of care is the explicit aim of this project, the quantitative method makes the most logistical sense.
Three potential designs that I could use for my project are: descriptive design, correlational design, and quasi-experimental design. A survey of participants would constitute a descriptive design and would provide data that could be analyzed or measured using a Likert-scale and tested for mean distribution or central tendency to show where the majority of the population resides with respect to certain questions asked in the survey (Sullivan & Artino, 2013). Correlational design could be used to determine the extent of the relationship between the two variables—the culturally-tailored health education strategy and the reduction of A1C levels in Asian American patients newly diagnose with type 2 diabetes, as in the case of this quality improvement project, for example.
Finally, there is the quasi-experimental design in which the population is not randomly selected but with which there is a control group and an experimental group and the aim of the design is to see the effects of the intervention on the experimental group as compared to the control group.
Based on the three potential designs, the potential analyses methods that could be used would be: for descriptive design, type of measurement could be nominal or ordinal, and the analysis could be to find percentage (frequency) or median. This type of analysis is appropriate because it describes the outcome of the intervention in a simple way that shows where the main trends are. For correlational design, analysis is meant to examine the extent of a relationship among variables to see if it is statistically significant so a correlation analysis would be conducted using the Pearson or Spearman correlation test, which is appropriate for linear measures. For quasi-experimental design, a t-test design would be appropriate as this compares the means of two groups to see if there is a statistical difference in the outcomes.
Topic 3
A survey that could be used for this project would be to ask participants 5 questions based on their intervention, using the 5 point Likert scale to measure the responses, out of a total score of 25. The level of measurement for this instrument would be ordinal (Sullivan & Artino, 2013).
Topic 4
The validity and reliability of the instrument I chose in Topic 3—the survey—has been shown to be well-founded in the past, so long as the survey is pre-tested, so that one has the assurance that it is actually capable of measuring the outcome that it purportedly intends to measure. A survey that is not capable of measuring the outcome it seeks to measure (because it does not ask the right questions) would not have validity because it would not be measuring what it intends to measure. The survey should also have reliability—i.e., consistency in the sense that the same outcomes can be expected of the same sample were the survey to be conducted time and time again.
This is different from external and internal validity in the sense that external validity refers to the extent to which the findings of the project extend to other populations. If the findings are only pertinent to the sample under consideration in the project, then external validity might be diminished. Internal validity refers to how well a project is executed. A project has internal validity if the independent variable is isolated and is certain of being the only factor that could be impacting the outcome that is being measured. If a project’s outcome could potentially be impacted by other variables, then it will lack internal validity.

References
Creswell, J. W. (2013). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. UK: Sage.
Lynn, J., Baily, M. A., Bottrell, M., Jennings, B., Levine, R. J., Davidoff, F., ... & Agich,
G. J. (2007). The ethics of using quality improvement methods in health care. Annals of Internal Medicine, 146(9), 666-673.
SQUIRE. (2017). Revised SQUIRE 2.0. Retrieved from
http://squire-statement.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Page.ViewPage&pageId=471
Sullivan, G. M., & Artino Jr, A. R. (2013). Analyzing and interpreting data from Likert-
type scales. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 5(4), 541-542.