WEEK 5 - QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH Flashcards
How and why is quantitative research done?
What are the major quantitative research designs?
What is the role of consistent and accurate measurement in quantitative research and healthcare?
What are the two main types of quantitative research design?
- Intervention studies
- Observation studies
What is an intervention study
- Researchers actively introduce or modify an intervention (such as a treatment, drug, or procedure) and measure its effects on outcomes. These studies are experimental because the researcher controls the exposure to the intervention.
- Experimental designs provide better evidence about causes and effects.
- A non‐experimental study that is also an intervention study is called a case series.
What is an observation study
- There are no deliberate treatments. Researchers allow events to happen naturally.
- Conducted when interventions are impractical or unethical.
- These studies are non-experimental, relying on naturally occurring circumstances.
What is descriptive research
- Describes a sample and compares groups within a sample on their characteristics or opinions.
What is a diagnostic accuracy research
- Has looked for interesting and innovative ways to detect serious health conditions.
Diagnostic Accuracy Research
- Purpose: To identify the cause or nature of a condition or disease.
- Example: A study to determine whether a new medical test can accurately detect a specific illness, like diagnosing diabetes with a new blood test.
- Goal: To assess the effectiveness or accuracy of a test or tool in identifying a problem
Descriptive Research:
- Purpose: To describe characteristics or behaviors of a population or situation.
- Example: A study that reports how many people in a community have high blood pressure or describes their age, gender, and lifestyle habits.
- Goal: To provide a snapshot or detailed account of something without trying to explain causes or relationships.
What are the 4 main levels of measurement
- nominal
- ordinal
- discrete
- ratio
What is an independent variable
- refers to the treatment and control or placebo conditions.
What is a dependent variable
- refers to the outcome measure, and could be categorical (e.g., patient’s condition improved or did not improve) or continuous (e.g., measures on a pain scale).
What is reliability?
- refers to consistency over repeated measurements, getting the same result from multiple measurements of an unchanging category or amount.
- measurements taken from the same unchanging person or thing are stable over repeated observations.
What are the 4 types of reliability?
Intra- rater
Inter rater
Te-retest
Alternate or Parallel forms
Intra- rater
Repeated measurements by the same person
Inter-rater
Measurements by at least two people
Test- retest
repeated measurements over time. similar to intra-rater only with a larger time gap between measurements.
Alternate or parallel
measurement instruments
Two broad groups of data
- Qualitative
- Quantitative
Nominal
- Observable, not measurable, e.g., gender, hair colour
Ordinal
- Ranked in order from first to last, e.g., strongly agree, agree, strongly disagree
Discrete
Relates to quantity (how many), e.g., time, temperature
Ratio
Measured on a scale from zero to infinity, e.g., height, weight