RESEARCH DESIGN

DESIGNING > spells out the

QUANTITATIVE basic strategies that researchers

STUDIES adopt to develop evidence that is

accurate and interpretable

JENNIFER RHAE J. LIM, DNM, MAN, RN

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IN QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES

nurse researchers want to test the

COMPARISONS
effects of a specific intervention In most studies, researchers develop
comparisons to
NON EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES provide a context for interpreting
results.
the researcher observes phenomena as they naturally occur without
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intervening.

COMPARISON STUDIES
TIME OF DATA COLLECTION
1. COMPARISON OF 2 GROUPS
2. COMPARISON OF ONE GROUP STATUS AT 2 OR MORE POINTS IN TIME > In most studies, data are collected from participants at a
3. COMPARISON OF ONE GROUP STATUS UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES single point in time.
4. COMPARISON BASED ON RELATIVE RANKINGS
5. COMPARISON WITH OTHER STUDIES
> Some designs,however, call for multiple contacts with
participants, usuallly to determine how things have changed
overtime
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 COMMUNICATION WITH SUBJECTS
RESEARCH SITES & SETTINGS HOW WILL INFORMATION BE PROVIDED WHAT IS THE READING & COMPREHENSION
LEVEL OF THE LEAST SKILLED PARTICIPANTS
RESEARCH SITES: overall location for the ORALLY OR IN WRITING?
research

RESEARCH SETTINGS: more specific

places where data collection will occur •Will there be debriefing sessions after
data are collected to explain more fully
the study purpose or to answer Who will provide the information, and what will that
questions? person be expected to say in response to additional
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questions participants might ask?
―J.R.LIM, DNM, MAN, RN

Quantitative Designs
tend to be fairly
structured
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COHORT COMPARISON DESIGN

CROSS-SECTIONAL COHORT group of people
FORWARD-
DESIGNS PROSPECTIVE COHORT STUDY LOOKING
COHORT STUDY
involve the collection of
data at one point in time RETROSPECTIVE COHORT BACKWARD
STUDY LOKING COHORT
STUDY
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 TREND STUDIES
LONGITUDINAL DESIGN
Different samples are
A study in which data are collected
at more than one point in time over selected at repeated
an extended period
intervals, but the samples
are always drawn from
the same population.
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CROSS
SEQUENTIAL
DESIGN FOLLOW- UP STUDIES
two or more age cohorts ● are usually undertaken to determine the
subsequent development of individuals
are studied longitudinally who have a specified condition or who have
received a specified intervention
ALSO KNOWN AS
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PANEL STUDIES

ATTRITION
● ONE OF THE MOST
SERIOUS CHALLENGE IN
RESEARCH
● LOSS OF PARTICIPANTS
OVER TIME
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 EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH RANDOMIZATION
ALSO CALLED “RANDOM ASSIGNMENT”
TRUE EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH DESIGN EVERY SUBJECT HAS AN EQUAL CHANCE OF
BEING ASSIGNED TO ANY GROUP
MANIPULATION: The researcher does something to at least some subjects
> IF SUBJECTS ARE ASSIGNED IN GROUPS
CONTROL: The researcher introduces controls over the experimental situation RANDOMLY, THERE IS NO SYSTEMATIC BIAS

PREFERRED SCIENTIFIC METHOD FOR

RANDOMIZATION: The researcher assigns subjects to a control or EQUALIZING GROUPS
experimental group on a random basis

EXPERIMENTAL / TREATMENT GROUP CONTROL GROUP

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EXPERIMENTAL DESIGNS
● AFTER ONLY DESIGN / POST-TEST
involves randomly
assigning clusters of individuals to DESIGN
different treatment groups Data on the dependent variable are collected
only once—after random assignment is
completed and the experimental
treatment has been introduced.
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BEFORE-AFTER DESIGN/ SOLOMON FOUR GROUP DESIGN

PRETEST-POST TEST
DESIGN a type of experiment where participants get randomly assigned
to either 1 of 4 groups that differ in whether the participants
receive the treatment or not, and whether the outcome of
interest is measured once or twice in each group.

1.A treatment group with both pre-intervention and post-

intervention measurements (a.k.a. pretest and posttest)
before—after design or a pretest—posttest design:
In such designs, the initial measure of the 2. A control group with both pretest and posttest
measurements
dependent variable is often referred to as the
baseline measure, and the posttest measure of 3. A treatment group with only post-test measurement
the dependent variable may be referred to as the
outcome measure. 4. A control group with only a post-test measurement
it is considered good practice to collect the pretest
data before randomization into groups. This ensures
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that subjects (and researchers) will not be biased in

any way by knowledge of the group assignments.
 The objective is to assess the efficacy of the treatment (or
intervention).
PRETEST SENSITIZATION
> (a.k.a. interaction between pretest and treatment)
> occurs when the use of the pretest increases or decreases
The Solomon four-group design was
developed to:
the responsiveness of the participants to the study
1.Control threats to internal validity: Such intervention.
as bias and confounding. Something that a
standard (two-group) experimental design
Limitations of the Solomon four-group design
can control. The Solomon four-group design is not used a lot in
practice because of its high cost, since compared to
1.Control threats to external validity: Such
as pretest sensitization. Something that a a standard design with 2 groups it requires twice the
standard (two-group) experimental design sample size, time, materials, resources, and
cannot control.
personnel/work.
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FACTORIAL DESIGN RANDOMIZED BLOCK DESIGN

• MANIPULATING TWO OR MORE VARIABLES SIMULTANEOUSLY • there are two factors (independent variables), but one factor is not
• PERMITS THE TESTING OF MULTIPLE HYPOTHESES experimentally manipulated.
• If you test two variables, each level of one independent variable is • Suppose that we were interested in comparing the effects of tactile
combined with each level of the other independent variable to create versus auditory stimulation for male versus female infants. We could
different conditions. structure this as a 2X2 experiment, with the type of stimulation as one
EXAMPLE: factor and gender as the other.
➢ The variable GENDER which we cannot manipulate, is known as BLOCKING
Does auditory stimulation VARIABLE
have a more beneficial effect on • if we consider gender a confounding variable because we believe
the development of premature that male and female infants will respond differently to the two
infants than tactile therapies, then a randomized block design is needed
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stimulation, or vice versa?

CROSSOVER DESIGN/ REPEATED MEASURE THE CONTROL CONDITION

DESIGN • The control group condition used as a basis of comparison in a
study is referred to as the COUNTERFACTUAL
➢involves the exposure of the same subjects to more than
one experimental treatment POSSIBILITIES FOR THE COUNTERFACTUAL
1.) Alternative Intervention
• Although crossover designs are extremely powerful, they are inappropriate
2.) Placebo/ Pseudo intervention: presumed to have no therapeutic value
for certain research questions because of the problem of carry-over effects.
3.) Standard Methods of Care
• Drug studies rarely use a crossover design because drug B administered
4.) Different doses or intensities of treatment wherein all subjects get some
after drug A is not necessarily the same treatment as drug B administered
type of intervention, but the experimental group gets an intervention that is
before drug A
richer, more intense, or longer
5.) Delayed treatment
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 EXPERIMENTAL STRENGTHS EXPERIMENTAL LIMITATIONS
1.) Part of the difficulty lies in the requirements for randomization and then equal treatment within
1. ) True experiments are the most groups.
powerful method available for testing
hypotheses of cause-and-effect 2.) Experiments that are undertaken without a guiding theoretical framework are sometimes
criticized for being able to establish a causal connection between an independent and dependent
relationships between variables. variable without providing any causal explanation for why the intervention resulted in the observed
outcomes.
2. ) Studies using an experimental
design are in general thought to yield 3.) It may be especially difficult to maintain the integrity of the intervention and control conditions if
the highest-quality evidence regarding the study period extends over time.
the effects of specific interventions and 4.) HAWTHORNE EFFECT: Knowledge of being included in the study appears to have affected
nursing actions. people’s behavior, thereby obscuring the effect of the variable of interest.
DOUBLE-BLIND EXPERIMENTS: neither subjects nor those who administer the
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treatment know who is in the experimental or control group, which is so powerful.

QUASI-EXPERIMENTS NON EQUIVALENT CONTROL GROUP DESIGNS

NON-EQUIVALENT CONTROL GROUP PRETEST POST-TEST DESIGN
Involves an experimental treatment and 2 groups of subjects observed before and
after its implementation
like true experiments, involve the
manipulation of an independent NON-EQUIVALENT CONTROL GROUP ONLY POST-TEST DESIGN

variable, that is, an intervention. No pre-test done

However, quasi-experimental
designs lack randomization to
treatment groups, which
characterizes true experiments
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TIME SERIES DESIGNS EX-POST FACTO/ CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH

Also known as
EX-POST FACTO
INTERRUPTED TIME SERIES ➢ LATIN WORD WHICH MEANS “FROM AFTER THE FACT”
DESIGN ➢ THE STUDY HAS BEEN CONDUCTED AFTER VARIATIONS IN THE
INDEPENDENT VARIABLE HAVE OCCURRED
Information is collected over an ➢ OFTEN REFERRED TO AS CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH
➢ CORRELATION: Basically, an interrelationship or association between two
extended period and variables
intervention is introduced
➢A correlational research design investigates relationships
during that period. between variables without the researcher controlling or
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manipulating any of them.

 RETROSPECTIVE DESIGN
➢ phenomenon existing in the present is linked to phenomena that occurred NATURAL EXPERIMENTS
in the past before the study was initiated. That is, the researcher is The group exposed to natural or other Example of a natural experiment:
interested in a present outcome and attempts to determine antecedent phenomena that have important health Keane, Jepson, Pickett, Robinson, and
factors that caused it. consequences is compared with the McCorkle (1996) studied the
➢ early epidemiologic studies of the link between cigarette smoking and lung non-exposed group. Such natural experiences of fire survivors, and
cancer were RETROSPECTIVE experiments are nonexperimental attributed high levels of distress to
PROSPECTIVE NON-EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN because the researcher does not
intervene but simply observes the
those experiences 14 weeks after the
fires, even among victims who did not
➢ (sometimes called a prospective cohort design) starts with a
outcome of an external event sustain physical injury
presumed cause and then goes forward in time to the presumed
effect.
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DESCRIPTIVE RESEARCH PREVALENCE STUDIES

The second broad class of nonexperimental studies is descriptive research.
The purpose of descriptive studies is to observe, describe, and document
aspects of a situation as it naturally occurs and sometimes to serve as a
starting point for hypothesis generation or theory development
Done to determine the prevalence rate of some condition (e.g., a disease
or behavior, such as smoking) at a particular point in time
INCIDENCE STUDIES
Used to measure the frequency of developing new cases

DESCRIPTIVE CORRELATIONAL RESEARCH PILOT STUDY

Descriptive correlational research aims to describe the relationship among
(sometimes called a feasibility study)
variables rather than infer cause-and-effect relationships.

Rigorous experimental tests of interventions are expensive, and so it

is often useful, to begin with, a small-scale test to determine the
feasibility of a larger study
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RANDOMIZATION
the most effective method of controlling individual
extraneous variables— is randomization. The primary
function of randomization is to secure comparable groups,
that is, to equalize groups with respect to extraneous
CONTROLLING EXTRANEOUS VARIABLES variables.
controls all possible sources of extraneous variation, without any conscious
decision on the researcher’s part about which variables need to be controlled
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 Homogeneity
Example:
Physical training program: suppose our subjects were in
two different nursing homes; those in one nursing home
will receive the physical training program and those in
the other nursing home will not receive it. If gender were
considered to be an important confounding variable (and
if the two nursing homes had different proportions of men
and women), we could control gender by using only men
(or only women) as subjects.
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BLOCKING
A randomized block design is an experimental design where the
experimental units are in groups called blocks.
EXAMPLE:
If a farm has a field of corn affected by a plant disease and wants to test the efficacy of
different fungicides in controlling it, they may split the field into blocks and randomly treat
section of each block with the various fungicides to be tested. This is an example of a block
design experiment. By splitting the field into blocks, the farm may be able to account for
certain variations and confounding variables that might exist in the field.

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MATCHING REPEATED MEASURE

Matching is a technique used to avoid confounding in a study
design. In a cohort study, this is done by ensuring an equal
Repeated-measure design is a
distribution among exposed and unexposed of the variables research design in which
believed to be confounding subjects are measured two or
more times;
EXPOSED VS NON EXPOSED GROUP SHOULD HAVE MATCHING
CHARACTERISTICS Rather than using different
participants for each level of
treatment, the participants are
given more than one treatment and
are measured after each.
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STATISTICAL CONTROL
To Achieve Quality through the use of Adequate Statistical Techniques
Quantitative researchers usually try to design a study to achieve the
highest possible precision, which is achieved through accurate measuring
tools, controls over extraneous variables, and powerful statistical methods
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JENNIFER RHAE J. LIM, DNM,MAN,RN

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