Exam 10: Quantitative Methodology: Noninterventional Designs and Methods

Researchers studied alcoholism recovery, comparing the success rate for two groups of participants: those receiving individual psychotherapy and those not receiving individual psychotherapy. The researchers measured sobriety once, at 18 months' posttreatment initiation. What study design would be most suitable for this type of research project?

If a researcher plans to study graduate-level achievement in all students who were educated under the Vermont public school system, in a small town that used both state-mandated texts and enrichment texts of the school board's choosing, the researcher would be using a fairly small sample, bound by geography and time. Which type of validity is decreased by a study like this one?

Why is selection of an appropriate design for a Non-interventional research study important?

Hospital nurses are observed in order to determine exactly how long nurses at a major urban hospital swab IV ports with alcohol. The researcher chooses to observe nurses in a high-acuity emergency department within that hospital. Because the nurses often are in near-code circumstances, they "scrub the hub" only as long as they have time to do so. Collecting data exclusively from this high-acuity unit is an example of what concept, relevant to quantitative research?

Several television programs, such as those with an amateur performance component, allow viewers to text in votes for their favorite performer. From a research point of view, this is what kind of a design?

A researcher analyzes the past 3 years of patterns of hospital admissions, mortality, and primary diagnosis, drawing from the admission department's database. What kind of research could this be?

A researcher surveys patients at various points of their hospitalizations, relative to the quality of hospital food, measured on a scale that includes taste, texture, amount, temperature, and general appearance. Demographic data collected include age, gender, ethnicity, income, and family information, plus dates of admission and discharge for each patient. Variables related to food include individual items' protein, fat, and calorie content, a self-rating of appetite at three points of the day, special diet requirements, and type of diet eaten at home. The researcher uses multiple regression analysis to make sense of the copious data. The number of hours that elapse between survey completion and hospital discharge seem to be the strongest predictor of quality of hospital food. Which three of the following statements are most likely explanations of this finding, considering the study's Non-interventional design?

Correlational research has which of the following characteristics?

Which of the following are potential sources of bias when conducting a research study?

Why is the threat of participant attrition more problematic in longitudinal designs than in other types of descriptive research?

Predictive correlational studies are designed to provide a way to predict the value of one variable, in relation to another variable. Which of the following research studies are predictive correlational in design?

How does a comparative descriptive design differ from a typical descriptive design?

What are the desired outputs of model-testing designs?

Which one of the following research approaches tests causality?

Structural equation modeling (a type of model-testing research) uses large samples. What is the reason for this?

A theoretical model is developed through qualitative research. The model explains family dynamics in relation to a new leukemia diagnosis for an infant. The researcher now tests the model, using structural equation modeling (SEM). The final model contains family size, parental age, availability of extended family support, economic status, insurance status, and parental religious beliefs, as they predict anger, depression, effective decision-making, parental self-care, and cohesion. Which of the following are true, in relation to the model's variables?

A hospital manager reviews the past year's charting to determine what kind of oral care patients have actually been receiving, who has been delivering the oral care, and oral care's relationship with infection of all sources. This study could be which of the following?

What do cross-sectional designs, trend designs, and longitudinal designs have in common?

Random selection of 300 participants yields a sample. Demographic analysis of that sample reveals that there are 99 teachers in the sample, despite the fact that the target population contains far fewer than 33% teachers. Which term describes the sample?

Researchers study 54 nonsmoking women with stage IV non-small cell lung cancer, for the purpose of describing the women's progress in response to standard treatment, which all of them receive. Which of the following designs would be suitable for this study?