Quantitative Research Critique Part I Introduction

It is important to note, from the onset, that the health and wellbeing of women is often impacted upon negatively by intimate partner violence (IPV). In the past, various research studies have attempted to not only assess the impact of IPV on the health and wellbeing of women, but also the strategies that ought to be implemented in seeking to care for victims of IPV. In their study titled Nurses' Preparedness to Care for Women Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence: A Quantitative Study in Primary Health Care, Sundborg, Saleh-Stattin, Wändell, and Törnkvist attempt to evaluate how well nurses are prepared to not only highlight, but also advance the appropriate nursing care to IPV victims seeking primary health care.” In critiquing the article, this text will largely focus on the said article’s problem statement/purpose, literature review, theoretical framework, hypotheses/research question, and design.

Problem Statement/Purpose

Sundborg, Saleh-Stattin, Wändell, and Törnkvist state the purpose of this particular article as “to assess nurses' preparedness to identify and provide nursing care to women exposed to IPV who attend primary health care.” This being a descriptive research study, it may not be possible to establish cause and effect or correlate variables. In contrast to other kinds of research (i.e. experimental research), descriptive research seeks to assess or highlight specific features of the phenomenon or population being studied. In this case, the study sought to assess the preparedness of nurses to care for women victims of IPV. The purpose of this research does imply empirical testability. Testability is a tenet that ought to be central in the design of all studies. In this case, testability is promoted by the clear definition of the population under consideration and the specific distinguishing features of interest. It is important to note that the authors of this particular study specify the population in the problem statement as nurses working with IPV victims in private health care. It should be noted that the issue or concern that the authors of this study set to investigate is of great relevance to nursing. This is more so the case given that IPV has variously been identified as one of the public health concerns having the greatest impact on the health and wellbeing of women. In that regard, therefore, any undertaking that is keen on promoting the ability of nurses to further enhance their...

51). To successfully take into consideration useful information on the concern under enquiry, the review of literature ought to be not only comprehensive and diverse, but also well organized. The authors of this study conduct meaningful and comprehensive review of literature from a variety of sources. The majority of the sources used are current and they are relevant to the concern being queried. The authors also source some materials from sources that, at first instance, appear outdated – i.e. sources that are more than 10 years old. According to Gray, Ferris, and White (2018), there is need to discriminate sources so as to ensure that that validity of the study is not in question. In the words of the authors, “validity is ascertained by ensuring the information is current, relevant, reliable and feasible….” (Gray, Ferris, and White, 2018, p. 50). It should, however, be noted that in this case, the validity of the study may not have been compromised as more than 90 percent of the materials the authors rely on are current in the context of this particular research undertaking.
The review of literature in this case is inclusive of conceptual literature, and relevance to not only the issues at hand but also the specific theoretical constructs as well as area of research is sustained. It should also be noted that in a move that further advances reliability, most of the sources used are sourced from reputable journals and other related nursing texts. Also, only a few secondary sources have been used – effectively meaning that most of the sources used are primary. Thanks to the authors’ efforts to critically analyze sources, the literature review section is not just a collection of annotations. Although the literature review does not include the strengths and weaknesses of each study, it does comprehensively compare and contrast the various studies cited therein. As has been highlighted elsewhere in this text, this being a descriptive research study, the dependent and independent variables were not necessarily correlated as no cause or effects were presumed. In aggregate, most studies cited therein seem to suggest that the relevance of further enhancing the preparedness…