Aim and Significance of the Study

Guided questions Answer Template
Guided Question Qualitative Study Quantitative Study
1. Aim and Significance (5
marks 200 words)
a. What was the aim and
significance of the study?
Smeulers, Onderwater, Zwieten & Vermeulen
(2014) were seeking to explore the experiences
of nurses to determine their perspectives on
how to prevent medical administration errors.
In research, a good study is the one that makes
it easy for the reader to identify the aim and
significance from the introduction. This study
was thus aimed at understanding how errors
can be reduced by the nurse since nurses are
the ones who are in charge of administering
medications. Further, the significance of this
study is to determine and recommend ways in
which nurses can reduce and address medical
administration errors.
The Sahaya, Hutchinson, & East (2015) study
sought to understand how workplace support
and relationships create an environment for
improving medical practice and reducing
medical errors. Thus its significance was to
understand how support relationships that
graduate nurses have with other professionals
are important in reducing medical errors. By
measuring the attitudes and perceptions of the
graduate nurses on how the clinical
relationships support their work, the study was
designed to understand how such factors affect
the health profession by either increasing or
reducing medical errors. According to
Shaughnessy, Zechmeister & Jeanne (2011) the
grand research approach, a good study needs to
have a significance to the industry that it
belongs to by having a significance that throws
weight to the existing research or opens avenues
for new research.
2. Methods (10 marks 700
words)
a. Identify the
research design used
in the study and was
it appropriate for the
issue discussed?
The researchers used the qualitative
exploratory study design to carry out the
research. This type of design offers many
advantages since in most cases, researchers
work with the respondents when collecting
The researchers used both exploratory and
descriptive to allow the researcher explore all
the variables for the study. When the variables
involved in a study are many the researcher can
combine two quantitative research designs thus

information from them. In most cases,
qualitative study methods require a good design
that allows gathering of appropriate data for the
study (Gelling, 2014). Further, the case study
fits most qualitative research because it allows
gathering of data and analysing as the study
continues. This allowed the researcher to
collect the data from the sample population so
that the findings of the study can be
generalised.
allowing contextual understanding and the
design of the hypothesis for the study. The
exploratory study works as the groundwork
through which the researcher uses to measure
the association between different variables in
the study (Donald & White, 2014). For
example, the variables being studied are
medical errors and nursing relationships. Then
the role of the descriptive study is to measure
the associations between the different variables
in the study problem. This type of research
design is fit for this study since the combination
of the two methods offers the best quantitative
results for the study.
b. Discuss the sampling
technique, inclusion and
exclusion criteria used for the
selection of sample in the study
Since the research was not based on a big
population but rather a selected group of
respondents. Then we can argue that both
purposive and snowball sampling were used for
the study. At first purposive sampling was used
to choose the study population of the
respondents that were chosen for the study.
This means that only nurses were purposively
chosen. On the other hand, snow ball sampling
was used to recruit the participants into the
study group where an email was send to them
and those who agreed were entered into the
study group (Voicu,2011).. This means that any
registered nurse qualified to be included in the
study. After that, semi-structured interviews
were used to carry out the research through
interviewing the participants. Snow ball
sampling is easy to apply since the researcher
The requirement for inclusion in this study was
a recent graduate in any of the three schools of
nursing in Australia. Emails for the students
were obtained from the university database and
a survey link send to the graduates requesting
them to participate in the study. Those
interested respondent to the link and were
directed to a survey form where they answered
a set of questions. The sample frame obtained
for this study was purposively sampled since
the researchers were concerned about a specific
study group rather than the whole population. A
sample of 50 respondents was obtained from the
study where the data collected from them was
analysed.

recruits the participants for the study on a
rolling basis until the required threshold has
been met.
c. Explore the data collection
method and its appropriateness
to the research design of the
study
Semi-structured interviews were used in this
process since they offer the best research tool
for qualitative research. Here Megan, Ranne,
Garro, Sasson & Morrow (2016) suggests that
the researcher has the freedom of interviewing
the respondents in a semi-structured way
making it easy to explore and follow any links
that are helpful for the study. After the
interview, the researchers allowed each
participant to reflect on their nursing
professionalism thus allowing the researchers
to verify some areas and sometimes verify
some insights from the respondents. By
following the verbal and non-verbal cues, the
researcher is able to gather more information
that may not be gathered in other conventional
tools like questionnaires. Such questions need
to be carefully structured and then a good
interviewer used to carry out the research.
A survey questionnaire was used to gather data
for the study through a link that was via email
and the student’s respondent to the
questionnaire which was hosted by Qualtrics®
an online platform in the university. The survey
questionnaire is appropriate for gathering
information from a large number of people.
Through questions that were designed using a
Likert scale, the respondents were asked to offer
their opinions, attitudes or perception about
certain aspects of the research problem. Thus
they were assessed on the level to which they
agree or disagree with the issues that were
asked (Donald & White, 2014). This methods
makes it easy for quantitative analysis since the
responses are entered into SPSS a computer
program for statistical analysis and then
presented through measures of distribution.
Thus the survey is the best method for the study
since it allows collection of quantitative data
that is easy for analysis.
3. Data analysis and results
(10 marks 600 words)
a. How was the data
analysed and was it
appropriate for the
study?
The interview data was analyse parallel with
the interview process through coding and
comparing the data to develop a consensus tree
for the study. Relevant themes that were
obtained from the study were identified and
compared with previous study findings to
The SPSS computer program was used for
analysis by entering the data in the program and
assessing the completeness of the survey
through removing the incomplete data to allow
easy analysis. To analyse and present the data,
measures of frequency distribution were used to