Nursing Research

Research Design
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Institutional Affiliation
Research Design
Introduction
Nursing research helps in enhancing efficiency of quality and safety of patients. Nurses need evidence to implement evidence-based practice. Research equips them with hands-on experience and knowledge which helps them to hypothesize, theorize, structure studies, and collect the relevant evidence to provide better care (Grove & Gray, 2018). The overall aim of nursing research is to improve the standards of care and applications for families and patients. This also implies that it is important that nurses understand the fundamental principles of research so as to understand how to conduct research and apply the findings. Nurses need such knowledge to help in advancing their field, offer better health care, and stay updated. Information literacy skills assist nurses in utilizing research information more efficiently in developing conclusions on health care (Boswell & Cannon, 2018). Understanding, evaluating, and using research helps nurses in promoting evidence-based practice in their careers. Two common types of research are quantitative and qualitative. The two types are important in improving nursing practice, as explored.
Quantitative Research
The nature and approach of quantitative research makes it important in nursing and other fields. It yields reliable findings since it is objective and utilizes statistics in generalizing a finding, making it applicable in different fields (Lee, 2019). Quantitative research also reduces and restructures a problem that is complex to a limited number of variables and seeks to establish how different variables relate, such as establishing a cause-and-effect in circumstances that are highly controlled. Further, it is applied in testing theories and hypotheses, and this achieved by assuming that a sample represents the entire problem. Such features make the method desirable in nursing research where there is a need for reliable findings with negligible biases.
Quantitative research exists in various designs, with the choice of design depending on the nature of study and variables. One such design is the descriptive research, which aims aim describing the current status of the primary variable (Mays & Pope, 2020). Such research projects are designed to enable the research to collect systematic information on a certain phenomenon. The study does not start with a hypothesis, but it is developed once data has been collected. The data is then analyzed and synthesized to test the developed hypothesis. Information is collected systematically by carefully selecting the units which were studied and carefully measuring each of the variables.
Application of quantitative research improves the efficiency and quality of nursing practice. It enables nurses to learn more on illnesses (Hennink, Hutter, & Bailey, 2020). Physicians are interested in learning as much as possible on a patient’s illness, and quantitative research helps them in getting the specific information that they want. It also improves healthcare facilities; quantitative research can be used to conduct research among patients on their opinions about the services and infrastructure of the facility, and the feedback col...