Question

SCENARIO:A nurse is concerned about patients’ abilities to maintain a healthy lifestyle after medical interventions. This concern focuses on the patients’ inabilities to change and maintain healthy behaviors to reduce recurrence of the disease. The nurse believes that the patients may have individual characteristics that explain why some appear more successful in maintaining a healthy lifestyle and why some return to previous behaviors. The nurse conducts a literature search and finds some linkage to individual differences in personality and change and maintenance of new behavior. The nurse also finds linkage between self-motivation and lifestyle behavior changes and maintenance. As a result of the literature search, the nurse believes that patients who are high in Conscientiousness (one of the factors in the Five-Factor Theory of personality) make better patient candidates for recovery (changing and maintaining new healthy lifestyle behaviors). The nurse also believes that if the patient is made aware of their family history of similar diseases that it would motivate the patient to maintain lifestyle changes. The nurse decides to run a small study to collect some preliminary data. The nurse in cooperation with two local hospitals randomly assigns the hospital as comparison and experimental groups. From the hospital lists of people starting recovery, the nurse randomly selects 10 patients from each hospital to follow. The nurse contacts the individual patients in the experimental group and after getting their permission administers the NEO-PI-3, a measure of personality, and completes a Genogram for the patient over three sessions. The nurse also contacts the individual patients in the control group and after getting their permission administers the NEO-PI-3. The nurse follows the patients for a three month period. At the end of the period, it does appear that patients that are high in Conscientiousness maintain their new healthy lifestyle changes. Also, the nurse conducts interviews with all the patients to determine their motivation level and finds some mixed results about the use of the Genogram as a motivator to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Questions:

1. What kind of study is this according to the methodology used? Justify your choice.

2. Write a research hypothesis/hypotheses or question(s) for this study and identify the independent and dependent variables in the study.
3. Critique the internal and external validity of the study as it is designed.
4. What type of data analyses was used in this study? Explain why you responded as you did.

5. If you were going to conduct a funded follow-up study, how would you redesign to enhance its validity and its generalizability?  In your redesign be sure to address the appropriateness of the tests used to measure the outcomes of the study and the statistical procedure(s) or other data analyses techniques that you would use to analyze data.

Answer 1