Methodical Reflection Nursing and Health Care

Questions: 1. Make a comparative discussion of the five overall study design (research designs). Give examples of suitable data collection methods for each of the five study design.2. Explain the goals variance and standard deviation and discuss how they are used in the quantitative method. Answers: 1.The research design refers to the overall approach adopted by the researcher to carry out the research study. In order to carry out the research in an effective manner, it is considered crucial to opt for the appropriate research design. There are various research designs such as experimental design, cross-sectional design, longitudinal design, case study, and comparative design (Taylor, 2006). Depending upon the nature of research and the peculiarities of the research work, the researcher identifies appropriateness of a particular research design. The experimental design is considered appropriate when the research involves some experimental work. The experimental design provides for the plans to be drawn to collect the data and perform analysis using different variables (Taylor, 2006). It could be said that the experimental design is a layout of the overall plan drawn by the researcher. The depth and quality of analysis depends upon the experimental research design chosen by the researcher. In the experimental research design, the data is collected by the primary data collections methods namely survey or interview (Taylor, 2006). The experiments are then performed on the data collected through survey or experiments. Another more commonly used research design is the cross-sectional design. The cross-sectional research design is suited most in the case of research being conducted in the social or medical areas. In the cross-sectional research design, the data collected belongs to different groups. Further, the data collection method used in this type of research design is observations. An example of cross-sectional research study could be the study on the cancer diagnosis on the different age people (Taylor, 2006). Apart from the above, another most frequently used research design is the longitudinal design. This type of research design is considered to be suitable for the research study conducted to explore the behavior of the individuals at different stages over the time span of their life (Bryman and Bell, 2015). The longitudinal research differs from cross-sectional research in the sense that the former studies one group of individuals whilst the later studies more than one group of individuals. The data collection method used in the longitudinal research is observation. Further, case study research design is also popular. In this case, the research is conducted to study a particular case study and find out the facts based on that study. The scope of research is very limited in the case of case study research. The case study differs from other researches in terms of its scope which is narrow as compared to experimental and other quantitative researches. The data for research is collected fr om the case study itself, thus, the method of data collection would be said to be the documents review (Bryman and Bell, 2015). In addition to the above discussed research designs, there is one more popular research design namely comparative research design. The researcher adopts comparative research design when the research is being conducted to compare two variables such as culture of two countries. The data collection methods applied in case of comparative research design could be primary such as survey or secondary such as documents review. However, care is required when collecting data in comparative research that the data attributes must be comparable with each other (Bryman and Bell, 2015). 2. The variance and standard deviation are the statistical computations which are used in the quantitative researches to analyze and interpret the data. The standard deviation is computed to find that the gap in the values from the mean of those values. In other words, the standard deviation is computed to find out the dispersion of the values from the mean (Fallon, 2016). Further, the variance is also used for the same purposes for which standard deviation is used. The variance is computed by taking the square of standard deviation. The standard deviation and variance both are used in the quantitative research to establish relationships between different data values of the data set (Fallon, 2016). In analyzing the quantitative data collected through survey, interview, or document review, the standard deviation is computed (Fallon, 2016). Further, the standard deviation is also used as the measure of risk in the research studies conducted in the financial sector. In terms of return on stock, the standard deviation measures the volatility of the returns which signifies the risk. Thus, the use of standard deviation is critical in the quantitative research studies (Fallon, 2016). References Bryman, A. and Bell, E. 2015. Business Research Methods. Oxford University Press. Fallon, F. 2016. Writing up Quantitative Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Springer. Taylor, B.J. 2006. Research in Nursing and Health Care: Evidence for Practice. Cengage Learning Australia.