Nurses Perspectives on Smoking
According to researchers, about 18% of all registered nurses in America smoke. In order to help these people quit the habit, and thus improve their health and the health of those around them, the authors stated purpose is to "develop a national program to assist nurses in smoking cessation." (Bialous, 2004, p. 387) To accomplish this goal, the researchers conducted a total of eight focus groups, in four states, consisting of current and former smokers in order to determine attitudes toward smoking, quitting, and to examine preferences towards types of programs.
Eight focus groups were conducted in four states, California, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Ohio. These states were chosen because California and New Jersey had low smoking prevalences, while the prevalence of smoking in Kentucky and Ohio were high. By using both low and high prevalence of smoking, the researcher can obtain a national average for the results of the study. To obtain the participants...
Anyone wanting to participate simply called a toll-free number and went through a screening process and the authors then accepted the first ten eligible callers. Since the study was being conducted to determine nurse's attitudes toward smoking and quitting, this is a suitable way to obtain nurses for the study, and it allowed any eligible nurse to participate regardless of age, race, sex, etc..
60 nurses in total participated in the focus groups with 59 completing the study. While researchers would always like to get the largest sample group possible, in this case 60 can be considered an appropriate number of test subjects as the actual dialogue from the focus groups was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Each focus group had seven or eight participants and lasted 2 hours, which was enough time for each subject to participate in…
