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...

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…