NSG 6101 Week 5 Discussion Research Design
Research Design
Is the use of soap and water or alcohol-based rubs more effective in preventing nosocomial infections? For patients 70 years and older, how effective is the use of the influenza vaccine at preventing flu compared to patients who have not received the vaccine? How effective are anti-depressive medications on anxiety and depression?
The aforementioned questions can be answered by the selection of an appropriate research design. A research design provides an appropriate structural framework to test hypotheses, estimate risk and evaluate causal-effect relationships. Several research designs can be deployed for the above research questions, although the selected design is a randomized control trial (RCT) study design. RCT is a study design that randomly allocates participants to compare a proposed new treatment against an existing standard of care (Nimavat et al., 2020). The rationale for selecting this design is that the research questions propose to explore an association between interventions and outcomes. For instance, the research questions require comparing the treatment and control groups. Additionally, the variable to be evaluated is single, and the patient group is precisely defined. Finally, the above research questions are foreground questions that are appropriately solved by RCT (Nimavat et al., 2020). NSG 6101 Week 5 Discussion Research Design
The strengths of randomized control trials include being the gold standard of research designs as it provides the most convincing evidence of the relationship between exposure and effect. Similarly, RCT assesses the value of new therapies, eliminates bias by controlling factors not under direct experimental control, and once done right, the results, whether bad or good, contribute to the collective scientific body of knowledge (Hariton & Locascio, 2018). On the other hand, weaknesses of RCT include ethical considerations, expensive and time-consuming to conduct, loss of follow-up, difficulty to conduct properly, and influence of sponsorship (Zeilstra et al., 2018). Finally, failure to blind assessors to the randomized status of the participants and failure to randomize all eligible subjects are among the other common weaknesses of this study design.
References
Hariton, E., & Locascio, J. J. (2018). Randomized controlled trials – the gold standard for effectiveness research: Study design: randomized controlled trials. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 125(13), 1716. https://doi.org/10.1111/1471-0528.15199
Nimavat, B. D., Zirpe, K. G., & Gurav, S. K. (2020). Critical analysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial. Indian Journal of Critical Care Medicine: Peer-Reviewed, Official Publication of Indian Society of Critical Care Medicine, 24(Suppl 4), S215–S222. https://doi.org/10.5005/jp-journals-10071-23638
Zeilstra, D., Younes, J. A., Brummer, R. J., & Kleerebezem, M. (2018). Perspective: Fundamental limitations of the randomized controlled trial method in nutritional research: The example of probiotics. Advances in Nutrition (Bethesda, Md.), 9(5), 561–571. https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmy046 NSG 6101 Week 5 Discussion Research Design
