Critical Evaluation of Journal Paper

Running head: CRITICAL EVALUATION OF JOURNAL PAPER
Critical Evaluation of Journal Paper
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CRITICAL EVALUATION OF JOURNAL PAPER
Critical Evaluation of “Can lifelike baby dolls reduce symptoms of anxiety, agitation, or
aggression for people with dementia in long-term care? Findings from a pilot randomised
controlled trial”
Introduction
Moyle et al. (2019) conducted a study on assessing the intervention of lifelike doll on
reducing the symptoms like anxiety, aggression and agitation among the dementia patients in
long term care (LTC) facilities by applying the method of pilot randomised controlled trial
(RCT). This paper presents a critical assessment of the article by addressing each of the sections
to understand the implications of the study. The relevance of title and abstract, research design,
sample and sampling technique, data collection process, data analysis process, and results are
critically assessed in the paper followed by its relevance in nursing practice.
Title and abstract
A journal title is good when it presents the entire content of the paper in a short and
comprehensive manner. Secondly, it should be interesting to the readers so that they go through
the entire paper. Thirdly, a good title should contain the keywords from the paper which will not
only help the readers to have an overview of the research topic and its outcome, but also will
increase its availability during a keyword search (Nair & Gibbert, 2016). Hence, it can be said
that the title of the paper is consistent with the text.
Abstracts are brief summaries of the research articles. These provide a synopsis and
purpose of the research paper. In this article, the objectives are clearly mentioned in the abstract,

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CRITICAL EVALUATION OF JOURNAL PAPER
followed by a clear description of the methodology, results and conclusion. However, it does not
provide any glimpse of the literature review done in the paper.
Research design
In this research, mixed method pilot study approach was adopted. The timeline for the
study was three months, from August 2016 to October 2016. The mixed methods contained
randomized controlled trial (RCT) research design and descriptive semi-structured interviews.
The methods were applied parallelly.
The research question for this study was whether there is any significant impact of the
lifelike doll intervention along with the usual care on the anxiety, aggression, and agitation
symptoms for older people having dementia in the long term care (LTC) facility.
The study was needed to understand the impact of a specific type of intervention, like, in
this case, the presence of lifelike dolls, in the treatment of symptoms like anxiety, aggression,
and agitation for the dementia patients in the LTC.
There was one hypothesis in the study, which stated that the group of dementia patients
with lifelike baby doll intervention would demonstrate better improvement in their symptoms of
anxiety, aggression and agitation, in comparison to residents in the usual care control group. The
hypothesis in this paper is the scientific hypothesis as the statement consists of the expected
outcome from the scientific examination (Liu, 2018).
In the RCT design, there were two groups of dementia patients, with one group receiving
the intervention and the other receiving usual control care. 35 residents from five LTC facilities
received the 30 minute, individual and non-facilitated intervention sessions with lifelike doll for