SCENARIO: During medical examinations of the poor, a nurse observes that several
ID: 94646 • Letter: S
Question
SCENARIO: During medical examinations of the poor, a nurse observes that several of the patients smoked and had high blood pressure. The nurse reviewed the related literature and found that smoking and high blood pressure shared a positive relationship. The nurse believed that poverty may have an additive influence to smoking relationship with high blood pressure. The nurse decided to conduct an investigation into this relationship. The nurse collected data on over 100 patients. The data collected were blood pressure (high or low), smoking (currently smoking, not currently smoking but smoked in the last year, never smoked), and poverty. Poverty was measured as a self report by the patient. The nurse used a partial bivariate correlation to analyze the data. The nurse found that while controlling poverty, that smoking still had a positive relationship with high blood pressure (worth 50 points).
Questions:
What kind of study is this according to the methodology used? Justify your choice.
Write a research hypothesis/hypotheses or question(s) for this study and identify the independent and dependent variables in the study.
Critique the internal and external validity of the study as it is designed.
Critique the data analysis used in the study.
If you were going to conduct this study, how would you redesign to enhance its validity and at the same time make it reasonable to conduct? In your redesign be sure to address the appropriateness of using self-report poverty and the statistical procedure(s) that you would use to analyze data.
Explanation / Answer
This is an example of a Case Control Study,a study which compares patients who have a known diagnosed disease (cases) with people who don't have the disease (controls) and looks back retrospectively to compare how frequently the exposure to a risk factor(here, Smoking) is present in each group to determine the relationship between the risk factor and the disease (here,High Blood Pressure).Case Control study is considered good because less time is needed to conduct the study as the disease has already occurred.Here the independent variable is one that may cause or affect the outcome (smoking) and the dependent variable is the outcome itself (high blood pressure).
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