Exam 20: Collecting and Managing Data

What are the principal tasks of data collection?

What are the purposes of completing a pilot study?

A researcher is collecting data in a hospital during cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). The researcher has devised a data collection form that contains five columns for data entry. During the first three data collection periods, the form works reasonably well, although the researcher has to turn the page over and write on the back. During the fourth, however, the CPR incident occurs in the Emergency Department and includes many procedures and interventions, and the researcher ends up taking a blank piece of paper and recording data on that. Later, it takes the researcher 40 minutes to unscramble and collate the data, and record it properly. What must be done now?

A researcher intends to collect data, including patients' ratings of pain and anxiety, during a procedure. No electrical equipment or photography may be used in the procedure room. In order to record the various pain and anxiety ratings, the researcher may plan to use which of the following?

The quantitative researcher collects many pieces of quantitative data as words, not numbers. Prior to statistical analysis, all of the data pieces must be coded. What does this mean?

A nurse is conducting her master's thesis research in the unit in which she works as a staff nurse. The focus of her thesis is burned children's pain, with a child life specialist assisting the child versus without. She is providing child life specialist presence every other day at the mid-morning dressing change. For obvious reasons, she wants to keep everything else consistent for the 4 contiguous days of data collection. On the second day of four, with the child life specialist present, one child demonstrates poor pain control. The nurse researcher would ordinarily advocate for more pain medication for this child, but if she does, she will not be able to compare the data with that of the previous day. What is this an example of?

What is the general rule about collecting demographic data during an interview?

How may raw research data, with identifiers, obtained from a hospital be stored?

How may research data, code-named and stripped of all identifiers, be stored?

Planning as a step in the quantitative research process ends when the data collection has begun. Which is the true statement about planning in the qualitative research process?

Part of a research study entails that research subjects complete a printed form with checkboxes. The researcher decides ahead of time that any item that has more than one response checked will be treated as unanswered. What are logical ways the researcher can maximize properly answered items, without skewing the data?

A researcher is studying the way that ICU nurses prioritize the charting responsibilities for their 12-hour shift. The researcher happens to discover that nurses are administering medications as close to the ordered times as possible but consistently charting the times at which medications are ordered, not the time they are actually administered, even though that may be 2 or 3 hours later. What could the researcher do with this information?