Research and Evidence-Based Practice: For Nursing, Health and Social Care Students (Essentials) - Softcover

Vanessa Heaslip; Bruce Lindsay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908625597 ISBN 13: 9781908625595

Publisher: Lantern Publishing Ltd, 2019

Synopsis

From reviews:
“I would definitely recommend this book to any student starting a research module or even to refresh your memories ready for your dissertations/literature reviews. The content included is everything I would want to know as a student starting a research module. The glossary at the back is great for understanding the research terminology, which can often feel like a brand new language when you first start reading research papers. There are also handy references which you can use to do further reading and enhance your critical discussion within your assignments.
The book lives up to its intention to act as a lead-in to the research topic and has a clear and concise style throughout, whilst explaining things in the amount of detail needed to fully understand them. A must read for any nursing or health and social care student!”
Review on studentnurseandbeyond.co.uk, March 2019
Research and Evidence-Based Practice is an accessible textbook for nursing, health and social care students seeking to understand what research is and how it can provide evidence for practice.
Through clear explanations, key case studies, questions and activities, the book will help you to understand the principles of research and develop your own evidence-based practice. You will learn:

• Why research is carried out, what the aims are, and why it matters
• How to search and review the literature and evaluate the quality of research
• How research projects are designed, how participants are recruited, how data is collected and analysed, and how research findings are communicated
• About the costs of research and how it is funded
• About the ethics of research in health and social care
• How to review evidence and how evidence is used to improve the quality of care

This book will help you to demonstrate your understanding of research and evidence and to develop and promote best practice in health and social care.

Contents

Part One: Understanding research
1. Identifying the research aim
2. Reviewing the literature
3. Designing a study
4. Can it be done? Funding and ethics
5. Recruitment and data collection
6. Data analysis
7. What do we know now? Communicating research findings

Part Two: Evidence-based practice
8. Reviewing the evidence
9. Putting the evidence into practice
10. Audit and evaluation
11. 'Closing the circle': issues for the future

Glossary
References
Index

About this title

About the Author

Vanessa Heaslip is a Professor of Nursing and Healthcare Equity at the University of Salford, and a visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at Stavanger University, Norway. She has extensive experience in nursing and nurse education and is an experienced qualitative researcher. Her research interests focus on socially excluded groups whose voices are not traditionally heard in the academic or professional discourse, as well as experiences of marginalised communities who experience inequity of opportunity in accessing statutory services. Professor Heaslip has contributed to many books and has written journal articles, editorials and discussion papers. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Nursing and writes regular reviews for a variety of nursing and academic journals, based on her expertise in qualitative research, socially excluded groups, marginalised communities, equality and diversity.
Bruce Lindsay worked in health care for over thirty years after qualifying in children’s nursing and adult nursing in Sheffield. He was awarded a PhD for his research into the development of the care of children in acute hospitals. He was a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Nursing and Midwifery Research Unit at the School of Health Sciences, University of East Anglia, until 2012, and was a systematic reviewer for Cochrane for fifteen years. He is now a freelance music journalist and biographer.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

People use the word ‘research’ in two major ways. There is the idea of research as an activity: ‘I’m doing research’ or ‘I’m researching’. There is also the idea of research as a product: ‘we’re using research’ or ‘the research tells us to work like this’. In the latter case, we think it is more correct to talk about ‘research findings’ or ‘results’, not just ‘research’. For this reason, when we refer to the products or outputs of research projects we will usually use the term ‘research findings’. Research as a process or activity needs more careful consideration. For instance, there is a considerable media focus on obesity in Britain, and how we as a nation are becoming more obese. Let’s say we want to explore this further and want to know the weight of the average British resident. We ask all our friends (62 people) their weight in kilograms; we then add up all these weights and divide by 62. We decide that the answer tells us the weight of the average resident of Britain. Have we just done some research? Are we right to think that our result answers our question? If not, what should we have done? As this example shows, research doesn’t have a single definition that everyone agrees on. Some authors use the word ‘research’ to refer to any systematic inquiry or structured investigation. Others emphasise the need for a question to be answered or a phenomenon or event to be explored or investigated. Some definitions are very short. In preparation for the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is used to assess the quality of research carried out in higher education institutions in the UK, research was defined as ‘…a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared’ (Research Excellence Framework, 2012). Meanwhile, Polit and Beck (2012, p. 4) define research as ‘systematic inquiry that uses disciplined methods to answer questions and solve problems’. Both these definitions suggest that the ultimate goal of research is to develop, refine and expand a body of knowledge, while also recognising that research is a planned process of inquiry.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lantern Publishing Ltd
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908625597
• ISBN 13: 9781908625595
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 178