Vocabulary List

• Classification: Sorting or organizing things into groups based on their similarities or differences.
  
• Significance: The importance or meaning of something. 
  
• Persuasion: Convincing or influencing someone to think or act in a certain way.
  
• Incidence: The occurrence or rate of new cases of a particular disease or condition within a specified population during a specific period of time. It helps measure the spread and impact of diseases.
  
• Demographics: Characteristics of a population, such as age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, and so forth.
  
• Placebo: A harmless substance or treatment given to participants in a clinical trial that has no therapeutic effect but is used as a control in testing the efficacy of another substance or treatment. It helps researchers determine the true effects of a treatment.
  
• Morbidity: The state of being diseased or unhealthy, often used to describe the prevalence or incidence of diseases or health conditions within a population.
  
• Validated: Proven to be true, accurate, or effective through rigorous testing or research. 
  
• Descriptive: Providing information about the characteristics or features of something, often without analyzing or interpreting it.
  
• Anonymous: Without revealing one's identity or personal information.

1.1 Introduction to Scholarly Research

1.1.1 Purpose of the Course

(Brigham Young University-Idaho, 2024.)

In this class, you will learn two types of skills:

• How to use the scientific method.
• How to communicate with scientists, especially by reading and writing like them.

1.1.2 Scientific Method

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The scientific method is a set of prescribed steps used to test a proposed explanation of something that happens in the world. There are six basic steps in the scientific method. They are:

1. Observation: The scientific method starts with an observation or a question. Have you observed that men drink more energy drinks than women? Is this really true, or is it just based on your limited observations?
2. Research: Before you start your experiment, you will do background research to see what other scientists have found on the subject. What have other researchers found about the relationship between energy drink consumption and gender for example.
3. Hypothesis: A hypothesis is an educated guess about what you think you will observe. For example, a hypothesis based on your observations above could be: Men drink more energy drinks weekly than women.
4. Experiment: Now you will test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. For this course, you will send a survey to classmates. You will want to ask questions in that survey that will help answer your question.
5. Conclusions: After your experiment is complete, you will collect your data and analyze it to see if it supports your hypothesis. Your hypothesis may or may not be supported. That is okay!
6. Share Results: Finally, you will communicate your results by writing a paper and creating a poster to show others what you found.

To learn about this method, you will carry out your own scientific study using these methods. 

1.1.3 Communication

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As you can see above, the last step listed in the scientific method is Share Results. This is actually an oversimplification. Scientists share their thoughts, methods, and conclusions with each other the entire time they are working through a problem. They share their ideas in meetings, emails, grant proposals, study proposals, planning meetings, poster sessions, and just over lunch when they attend conferences for their field. Science is best done with other scientists.

1.1.4 Research Articles

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The most formal way that scientists communicate with each other is through research articles. A research, peer-reviewed, or scholarly article is an article that appears in a peer-reviewed journal that is reviewed by experts in the field for quality, accuracy, and relevancy. The authors are sometimes asked to make changes before the article is accepted for publication in the journal. This process helps to improve the quality and credibility of the published articles. In order to determine if a journal is peer-reviewed, you can examine the journal's website to determine if there is a peer-review process associated with the journal. Only certain types of articles undergo peer review. Synthesis, original research, and case studies are examples of articles that are peer-reviewed. Book reviews, opinions, and commentaries normally do not undergo peer review. Original research and case studies are usually organized with an abstract, introduction or background, methods, results, and discussion and/or conclusion. Many library databases let you filter your results to include only peer-reviewed articles. 

1.2 Introduction to Research Topics

(Frederiksen, 2020)

1.2.1 Topic Selection

Your first steps in conducting research are to choose an interesting topic and then to form it into a question. In this course, the topics are chosen for you. You will be able to choose one of the topics that most interests your group. In the real world you might choose a topic based on the following criteria: 

1. Choose an area where you have experience or something you are curious about.
2. Choose an area where more research is needed.
3. Think of a current problem in world health.
4. Read an article and consider what related topics could be explored.
5. Avoid personal or emotional topics because you need to be unbiased.

1.2.2 Question Formation

To form your research question, try adding your topic to one of the suggested questions below. Each of these represents a different type of research you might do.

1. What does                                mean? (Definition)
2. What are the various features of                               ? (Description)
3. What are the component parts of                               ? (Simple analysis)
4. How is                                made or done? (Process analysis)
5. How should                                be made or done? (Directional analysis)
6. What is the essential function of                               ? (Functional analysis)
7. What are the causes of                               ? (Causal analysis)
8. What are the consequences of                               ? (Causal analysis)
9. What are the types of                               ? (Classification)
10. How is                                like or unlike                               ? (Comparison)
11. What is the present status of                               ? (Comparison)
12. What is the significance of                               ? (Interpretation)
13. What are the facts about                               ? (Reportage)
14. How did                                happen? (Narration)
15. What kind of person is                               ? (Characterization or Profile)
16. What is the value of                               ? (Evaluation)
17. What are the essential major points or features of                               ? (Summary)
18. What case can be made for or against                               ? (Persuasion)
19. What is the relationship between                                and the outcome of                               ? (Explorative)

You will be given a list of articles to review for your chosen topic and you will be required to find two additional research articles. Based on what you read, you might decide to change your topic or question slightly.

1.2.3 Research Question Criteria

When thinking about your research question, the question should express a relationship between two or more variables. For example, "How is A related to B?" It should be clearly stated in a question form, such as, “How do mosquito nets (A) affect the incidence of malaria (B)?” or “How does parental education level (A) affect children’s vaccination status (B)?”  

1.2.4 Refining The Question

Once you have selected your topic and reviewed literature related to it, narrow it down to something that can be realistically researched and answered. Ask Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions.

You might begin by asking a series of PICO questions. A way to formulate an answerable question using the PICO model could look something like this:

• Patient, Population, or Problem: What are the characteristics of the patient or population? For example, gender, age, and other demographics. What is the situation or disease you are interested in? For example, diabetes or hypertension.
• Intervention or Exposure: What do you want to do with the patient, person, or population (treat, diagnose, observe)? Such as reaction to a specific type of treatment.
• Comparison: What is the alternative to the intervention (placebo, different drug, surgery)?
• Outcome: What are the relevant outcomes (morbidity, death, complications)? For example, how do lower cholesterol numbers impact the target population?

Some examples of how the PICO method is used to refine a research question include:

• “Is nutrition education an effective approach to lowering blood pressure? Population (older adults) / Intervention (nutrition education)”
• “Can physical activity help control type two diabetes? Population (adults) / Intervention (physical activity)”

Figure 3.2 Basic literature review process

After you have your research question, you will search the literature for relevant articles. You will then use these articles to write the introduction of your research paper. This introduction is sometimes called a literature review. The purpose of conducting a literature review is to locate the existing peer-reviewed articles that are relevant to your topic. This helps you examine what research has been done on the topic and what research still needs to be done on the topic.

1.3 Introduction to Surveys

1.3.1 What Makes a Good Survey?

Data Collection

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No matter the type of study design, you will need to collect data. In observational studies, you need to decide what exact behaviors you are looking for. If you were doing a clinical trial, you would need to decide what health outcomes to measure and how to record that information. In this class, you will learn how to conduct survey research for two reasons. First, you will conduct a survey in this class. Second, the skill of designing a quality survey transfers into every other study design.

Survey Design Essentials

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There are 9 basic steps in designing a survey.

1. Know your population. For this course, your population will be your fellow students. These students may represent different age groups, ethnicities, and genders.
2. Determine the type of survey. There are many different types of surveys including face-to-face, online, mail, or telephone surveys. This course will utilize an online survey.
3. Create a questionnaire. Writing good questions can be a difficult process. Look to other validated surveys for examples of how to write good survey questions.
4. Test your questionnaire. All survey questions should be pre-tested to ensure that they are understandable. 
5. Get a good sample. It is sometimes difficult to get a good sample that includes many different types of participants. For this course, we will use all of the students in the course as our sample.
6. Collect the data. Data collection should be rigorous, documented, and consistent. Each member of the course will be required to take all surveys. This will make it easier for each group to collect the data that they need.
7. Organize and clean the data. When you collect data it sometimes does not work well with statistical tools. Sometimes you will need to rescale and renumber your data. You will need to make sure your data is formatted correctly to work with Excel.
8. Analyze the data. You will use an Excel tool to help you analyze your data. You will look at descriptive statistics and correlations.
9. Present the results. Finally, you will write your final paper and present your poster to show everyone your results!

1.3.2 Survey Construction

(Brigham Young University-Idaho, Pryor 2024.)

When you design a survey, you want the information to be accurate and useful. The following tips will help you design a good survey question:

1. Questions should be interpreted in a consistent manner. This is sometimes hard to achieve. People in different countries may interpret questions differently. Asking the question “Have you had a serious illness?” could be interpreted differently. Some people may think a serious illness only involves a hospital stay, while others may think a bad case of the flu is a serious illness. Make sure your questions are clear and specific.
2. People should be willing to answer the questions. Some people are not willing to answer very personal questions. If you need to ask personal questions, you need to explain to the respondent why you need the personal information and assure them their answers are confidential and/or anonymous.
3. Questions should be answered truthfully. Some people might answer "No" to a question such as “Do you smoke?” since they know that smoking is frowned upon in many societies.
4. Question with a known answer. Make sure people have the knowledge to answer the question. If you ask the question “How much do you spend on sodas each month?” People might not know the answer. Instead, you may want to ask “How many sodas do you drink each week?”
5. Avoid double-barreled questions. These are questions that may have more than one answer. For example, if you ask “Do you eat more fruits and less vegetables each month?” respondents may not be sure how to answer the question.
6. Avoid biased terms or wording. Use more formal terms such as assistance to the poor instead of welfare to avoid biased wording.
7. Pretest your questions. Test out your questions with a small sample to see if there is any confusion. (While you would do this normally, you won’t need to do that in this class because of time limitations and most of the questions have been provided for you.)

1.3.3 Different Types of Questions

(Brigham Young University-Idaho, Pryor 2024.)

You will be using Google Forms to construct your survey. Google Forms offers the following options for survey questions:

1. Short Answer: The respondent types in an answer to the question. These are difficult to analyze and should be avoided.
2. Multiple Choice: The respondent will pick one answer from the choices. This can be done with a drop-down list as well.
3. Checkboxes: The respondent can pick more than one answer from the choices. This is also difficult to analyze.
4. Linear Scale: When you want to collect someone’s opinion numerically on a scale. You can change the scale, but it must start with either a 0 or a 1, and can go up to 10. You can also assign labels to each number such as Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree, and so on.
5. Multiple Choice Grid: This is useful when the first part of a question repeats for multiple questions. For example, a question that starts with “How many servings of the following do you each each day?” will have columns with numbers (0–5 or more) and rows with food choices. 

1.3.4 Including Demographic Questions

(Brigham Young University-Idaho, Pryor 2024.)

To have a clear understanding about your participants, you need to include demographic questions in your survey. Demographic questions may come across as personal, but they are necessary to determine differences between populations. A demographic is a characteristic of your participants and is helpful in categorizing your participants into smaller groups. The following are examples of demographic questions that can be useful in your survey creation:

• Age: There are a number of ways to ask this question. You can ask the participant to fill in the blank ("What is your age in years?") but this sometimes will get left blank. You can also give them a dropdown menu with every number from 18 to 100. This option is the best for calculating statistics about age. The third option is to organize the ages in ranges. This is less helpful if you want to calculate the mean age of your participant group. Figure 1.3.4.1 shows three different examples of age questions.

Figure 1.3.4.1: Three examples of age demographic questions.

• Sex Assigned at Birth: This question should be asked if it is essential to address the research question and if you are looking at differences between males and females. You may include a third option of “I prefer not to answer.”

• Ethnicity and Race: These questions can be critical for tracking health, academic, and other disparities between populations. Figure 1.3.4.2 is a good example of this type of question.

Figure 1.3.4.2: Race Question Example

• Current Country of Residence: Because this course is taught to students around the world, it may be helpful to ask participants their current country of residence (United States, Canada, Ghana, Nigeria, Colombia, and so on).

• Socioeconomic Status: This is a helpful question when your participants are all from the same country. However, since SES differs by country, it may be difficult to formulate the answer. Figure 1.3.4.3 is a good example of how to ask this question.

Figure 1.3.4.3

• Other Demographic Questions: Some other questions that could be pertinent to your survey are employment status, number of children, education status, disability, citizenship, income, language, relationship status, or religious affiliation.

1.4 How to Find Articles

1.4.1 Overview Of Discovery

(Frederiksen, 2020)

Discovery, or background research, happens again when you are ready to focus on your research question and begin your own literature review. There are two crucial elements to discovering the literature for your review with the least amount of stress as possible: The places you look and the words you use in your search.

The places you look depend on:

• The stage you are at in your research.
• The disciplines represented in your research question.
• The importance of currency in your research topic.

The words you use will help you locate existing literature on your topic, as well as topics that may be closely related to yours. There are two categories for these words:

• Keywords: The natural language terms we think of when we discuss and read about a topic.
• Subject Terms: The assigned vocabulary for a catalog or database.

The words you use during both the initial and next stage of discovery should be recorded in some way throughout the literature search process. Additional terms will come to light as you read and as your question becomes more specific. 

1.4.2 Finding Sources: Places To Look

(Brigham Young University-Idaho, 2024.)

The McKay Library at BYUI provides many tools to assist with research. 

1. Develop Your Topic
   • Choose a topic idea and explore available sources.
   • Tweak your topic to make it broader or narrower based on sources found.
   • Feel free to test and change topics.
2. Build Your Keyword List
   • Create a list of words or phrases to help narrow your topic.
   • Brainstorm possible subtopics, such as a specific population, location, or time period.
3. Find Sources
   • Look for articles found in periodicals. Choose scholarly articles for most academic research.
   • Use databases, which are electronic periodical indexes from thousands of journals on specific categories of topics.
   • Use your keywords to search within databases.
4. Read and Evaluate: Use the C.O.P.E. Method
   • Content: Is the information accurate and peer-reviewed?
   • Objective: Is the information biased or using persuasive language? 
   • Purpose: What is the author’s point of view?
   • Ease: Is it well organized with an index or search box and updated links?
5. Organize, Write, and Cite
   1. As you write your paper, keep track of sources according to APA style.
   2. Follow APA guidelines and use a citation manager such as Zotero.

1.4.3 Using the McKay Library Search Tool

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A search tool is provided for you to use in this course. Follow these steps to use the tool.

• Select the link above to take you to the search tool.
• There is a search box on this page that says Search for Articles. In the box, type in keywords, article titles, journal titles, or author names. Example:

• Select the Search button to the right. The search will automatically find full text articles that are peer-reviewed. Example:

4. To read the article click on Access options and choose Full Text, PDF or Online Full Text to read the article.

Test Yourself

Get an article

1. Access PubMed.
2. Do a subject search, using MeSH terms (for PubMed).
3. Do a keyword search.
4. Supplement your subject search with keywords, using advanced search tools like Boolean operators, truncation, or phrase searching.
5. Limit your search by language, date of publication or PICO factor.
6. Access the full text of an article you find.
7. If full text is not available, find out how to request the article through interlibrary loan.

In your general topic area, do you know:

1. The core source materials?
2. The most significant theories?
3. The major issues and debates surrounding your topic area?
4. The key political, social, economic, legal, environmental, and/or technological aspects of your topic?
5. The origins of your topic?
6. The definitions for your topic?
7. How knowledge in your topic area is organized?
8. What problems or solutions have been addressed to date?
9. If you don’t know the answers to these questions, do you know how to find the answers?

1.5 Using PubMed

(Brigham Young University-Idaho, n.d.)

PubMed is a database that consists of over 36 million citations and abstracts of biomedical literature. To access PubMed, you need to first access the McKay Library search tool.

To search PubMed follow these steps:

1. Identify the key words for your search.
2. Enter the terms in the PubMed search box.
3. Press Enter key or select Search.

The results of your search will be shown. You can further narrow down your search by using the filters on the left hand side of the page. For example, you can limit your search to the last 10 years of research by using the slider bar to move the years. You can also select the box that reads “Free full text” in order to only show articles that you will be able to download for free.

The figure below shows a sample search that has been limited to the years 1994-2023 and is free full text articles.

When you click on the article, you will be able to download the full text if available, and also save that article to your Zotero database (see Chapter 2).

NOTE: All content is licensed CC-BY-NC unless otherwise noted. This courseware includes resources from multiple individuals and organizations. See the “References” section at the bottom of each page for copyright and licensing information specific to the material on that page. If you believe that this courseware violates your copyright, please contact us.

References

Frederiksen, L. (2020). Literature Reviews for Education and Nursing Graduate Students. Rebus Community. https://press.rebus.community/literaturereviewsedunursing/front-matter/introduction/

License: CC-BY