Reducing Hospital Wait Times in Ontario

HLST 4200 6.0
Professor Liane Ginsburg
Term 1 Assignment: Research Question and Literature (7%)
Due September 22rd (all sections) via Moodle. Your assignment needs to be uploaded to the course website by 5pm or it will be considered late.
Assignment Summary
In this brief assignment you need to outline a sound research question (discussed in week 2) that interests you. This assignment is designed to get you thinking about questions that are “researchable”. From week 2 we know that not every question is a good research question. For this assignment you will perform a brief literature search for a research question that interests you and summarize the extent to which your question has been answered in the literature. If your literature review reveals that your question is too broad you can comment on how the question could be further refined.
Assignment Details
Submit a document that is maximum 600 words (which is roughly 1 page) with the following:
1. In one short paragraph, outline a research question that interests you, including 1-2 lines about why this question is of interest to you / why you think it is important.
2. Provide citations using APA style for 2-3 articles you find that are the most directly relevant to your research question. Full references for your articles must be included but are not counted as part of the 600 words.
§ To identify articles that are directly relevant to your research question, you will need to search and read at least the abstracts of many more than 2-3 papers.
§ Use pubmed and/or proquest ABI and proquest Nursing for your searches
§ At least one of the papers you include should be an empirical study (e.g. where they actually collect data)
§ Try to select papers from “good quality” journals. You can google a journal’s “impact factor” which provides a decent measure of how rigorous, well regarded and well cited a journal is (better journals have an impact factor that is greater than 1 or 2)
3. Provide the search terms you used in this process
4. Write up a couple bullets describing the extent to which these 2-3 papers shed light on (or answer) your research question. In these bullets you should mention whether each paper:
§ is a theory paper or empirical paper
§ provides data/answers to your research question (or data on a related research question if that was the best you could find) – and what do the authors conclude that is relevant to your research question
5. Conclusions: has your question been studied…if it was too broad, did the literature help you refine or modify your research question to make it better or more relevant?
6. Write one to two sentences outlining your learning from this assignment and any frustrations you experienced
NOTE: To do this in one page you will obviously need to be very clear and concise in your writing.
This is worth 7% and although it may seem easy to write one page, don’t underestimate the amount of time you will need to spend looking at the literature and writing (and re-writing) up your findings in order to do well on this piece of work.