Approaches to Health and Social Care Research: Critique Report

This report presents a critical analysis of a research paper by Veeramah (2012) titled 'What are the barriers to good mentoring?' The critique evaluates various aspects of the research, including the author's credibility, the abstract, rationale for the research, literature review, aim, ethical considerations, methodology, results, and conclusion. The analysis identifies strengths and weaknesses within each section, highlighting gaps in methodology, ethical reporting, and data analysis. The report emphasizes the importance of addressing these gaps to enhance the credibility and practical application of research in nursing mentorship. The critique concludes by summarizing the research's contributions and suggesting additional support from stakeholders to improve mentoring practices.

Running head: RESEARCH CRITIQUE
Research critique
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

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Title:
The title of the research by Veeramah (2012) is ‘What are the barriers to good
mentoring?’. This title reflects the content too as the whole research is centered around
implementation of research techniques to identify the barrier to successful mentoring for pre
registration nursing. The research evaluated mentor development programme in an
educational institute in South East England and explored barriers faced by 346 nurses. These
content reflect the title of the research which is appropriate.
Author’s credibility:
Author’s credibility is an important criteria to identify whether a source is reliable or
not. In case of the chosen research article, author’s credibility is understood from the right to
review of his credentials listed in the research paper. Ven Veeremah is a senior lecturer at the
School of Health Social Care University of Greenwich, London. His qualifications include
Dip, CertEd, RMN, BSc Hons, MSc, PhD and his main research interest is education and
training of nurses and midwives too. Based on his research interest and credentials, it can be
said that the author’s work is reliable as he has core knowledge in the field of nursing
(University of Greenwich 2018). The author’s expertise is also understood from the fact the
number of citations found for the author’s work in other research paper. His work has been
cited in 23 research articles which is an indication of the credibility of his work (Veeramah
2012).
Abstract:
In research papers, a good abstract is one which gives clear summary, idea and
content of the research projects. The details in this should be such that purpose, methodology,
results and conclusion of the paper is easily identified. The review of the abstract of the paper

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by Veeramah (2012) shows that the abstract gives brief detail about the aim and objective of
the research and results obtained from the paper. However, the gap in abstract is that it does
not define the methodology and the manner in which the result was obtained. No separate
heading has been provided for each section like aim, background, methodology, results and
conclusion. Hence, an incomplete presentation of abstract is a drawback of this paper.
Rationale for research:
While reporting about any research, explaining about the rationale for a research sets
the context and defines the significance of the research work for particular field of research.
The rationale for research should be written in such a way that it defines the importance and
ground for conducting research in a particular area. Valid arguments and evidences are
necessary to define effective defines rationale for research. Gaps in evidences and the gravity
of the research problem should be defined too (Sarma 2015). The researcher Veeramah
(2012) has defined the rationale for investigating about the barrier to good mentoring by
stating about the introduction of new standards for mentoring by NMC and giving a cue that
research evidence shows mentors face many barriers while undertaking their role in research
practice. However, this section of the paper is not considered credible as very limited
arguments has been placed regarding barriers in mentoring and no evidence has been cited for
identifying barriers. This makes the rationale for research very weak. Comparison and gaps in
three or four research papers would have strengthened the argument and increased
understanding about the significance of the research. Hence, this section has not been
adequately reported.
Literature review:
The author Veeramah (2012) has presented a short literature review giving evidence
about difference research papers that has reported about barriers in mentoring. However, the

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gap in this literature review is that it is comprehensive, but it does not give a critical review
of gaps in research methodology. This is said because the author has discussed about many
research evidence on the topic and the experience of barriers faced by mentors. However,
they miss analysis of research method. The evidences covered in the research papers are
published from the year 2000 to the year 2010. This is a strength of the paper because the
research is published in 2012 and considering the published year, it has given details about
both recent and past work on the topic. As critical review is missing, there was a need to
make the literature review section more detailed by including gaps in research methodology
and research techniques too. This would have given direction to improve research design and
enhance the credibility of the research work (Hart, 2018). For example, as the author has
revealed about studies where mentors have reported about constraints in their role, there was
a need to evaluate the sampling technique, research setting and the data collection method to
further comment on the gaps in past research work and the need for more research on this
topic. Machi and McEvoy (2016) support this by stating that critiquing the literature and
drawing conclusion about a research evidence is important.
Aim of the research:
The research paper has clear which was to explore barriers faced by mentors in
mentoring. The objective of research has been made more explicit by identifying both the
mentor development programme in south east England and NMC standards based on which
the mentoring programme has been selected in the selecting setting (Veeramah 2012).
Ethical issues:
While conducting a research, consideration about ethical issues and ways to prevent it
is important to ensure transparency in research. Some of the important ethical requirement in
research includes taking informed consent, maintaining confidentiality and preventing any

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form of misconduct during research. Following ethical guidelines relevant to the Local Ethics
Review Committees is also important (Yip, Han and Sng 2016). The critical analysis of the
research paper by Veeramah (2012) shows that ethical approval for research was taken from
the University Research Ethics Committee. However, no detail was found regarding informed
consent requirement and maintaining confidentiality of research data. This implies that
ethical issues related to violation of informed consent were not identified in the paper which
might affect the credibility of the research evidence. This may also affect the quality of the
paper and the likelihood of implementing evidence based practice. As stated by Yip, Han and
Sng (2016), human research participants serve as the main source of research data, it is
important that researchers take the responsibility to protect health, integrity, privacy and
confidentiality of research subjects. Hence, evaluation of respect for person, beneficence and
justice is important in any research paper. As the number of research activities is increasing,
complying to ethical and legal issues are important.
Methodology:
Research design:
The methodology section of the paper has many major drawbacks and limitations as
many important details were missing. The author Veeramah (2012) mentioned about the use
of self administered postal questionnaire to collect data. However, no details regarding the
research design and rational for selecting specific research design was found. The
questionnaires used however revealed that the researcher used qualitative research method.
To develop a high quality and reliable research paper, it was necessary to give some
discussion on study design and rationale for choice of design. This form of discussion is also
important to understand the philosophical underpinnings of research. Good overview of

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research design is also necessary to understand the scope of research and the depth of data
which needs to be uncovered.
Reporting about the research methodology in a clear and concise manner is critical to
transferability and generalizability of the research work too. This may help to replicate the
research in other setting and find the importance of any issues in target setting. However, lack
of details regarding the research design and context of the study reduced the transferability of
the work. However, the use of questionnaire is useful as it gave good details regarding
important concepts related to mentoring. This is understood from the development of
questionnaire and presentation of separate tables for important concepts like barriers faced in
mentoring, reasons for passing students and sources of support needed to fulfil mentor role.
Sampling method:
Another major drawback of selected research article is that explicit details on the
method used to select samples have not been provided. Although the methodology section
reveals about the sample size and samples used for research, however no details on sampling
technique has been used. There were 346 sample size and this included nurses who had
completed the new NMC mentor preparation course. However, discussion on sampling
technique was critical to the credibility of the work too. Consideration about sampling
technique is also reflective of the fact that the Veeramah (2012) has considered options to
promote validity and reliability of the data. Probability and non probability sampling are two
major sampling techniques and the main goal of sampling is to ensure that such sample is
taken that is representative of the target population. Details about sampling technique would
have also given information regarding any sampling error or selection bias while collecting
(Suresh, Thomas and Suresh 2011). However, as no sampling method has been identified,
this makes the research paper vague and difficult to follow. Sample size estimation is also

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vital while making any research paper (Chow et al. 2017). In case of the selected research
paper, sample size has been identified. However, there is no discussion regarding identifying
accurate sample size that is needed to meet the study objective. Therefore, it can be
concluded that poor reporting about research design and sampling technique make the paper
weak for practical application and evidence based practice.
Data collection:
Postal questionnaire was the main instrument to collect data from nursing students.
The main advantage of using postal questionnaire as a tool for data collection is that it saves
time and increases the possibility to get larger response from target audience. It can also
increase the likelihood of higher participation of research participants in research as it
reduces the hassle of visiting researcher center to give response to questionnaire. Despite the
use of this tool for data collection, one of the limitation is that the method is not auditable as
the researcher has not defined how the response was collected and transcribed. However,
approach taken to develop the questionnaire was defined. For example, comments from
lecturers and students and literature review on the topic were used as a guide to develop
questionnaire and this approach can be replicated by others too.
Data analysis:
Data analysis in research is the process or method used to arrange and critically
analyzed data. In case of the study by Veeramah (2012), the approach used to analyze data is
completely missing. The result outcome has been directly described. However, there is no
details on the steps that was taken to transcribe and analyze the response. This limits the
credibility and reliability of the work.
Results:

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While reporting about the research outcome, it is necessary to define key outcomes
and reflect on it by comparing with other research papers and drawing conclusion on the
importance of the outcome for the target field of interest. Another important criteria for
appropriately reporting about research outcome is that the research objective must be stated
while presenting research findings. The results section of the paper gives details about the
clinical specialties of research participants, barriers impeding mentoring, reasons for passing
and solutions to address the barrier. From these findings, it is understood that research
objective has been met. However, the same has not been reported. The discussion section
should also identify strength and limitation of the work and this was missing in the paper.
However, certain reflection on additional help and support was found.
Conclusion:
The conclusion in a research paper can be said comprehensive when it summarizes
the research outcome and reflect on implications of the findings for target population. The
finding is comprehensive as it expresses what the contributions of this research work are and
what additional support can stakeholders provided to improve the research problem. The
research problem in this case was barrier to mentoring and Veeramah (2012) mainly
concluded that mentors should collaborate with clinical placement providers to attend regular
mentoring workshop and successfully overcome the challenges confronted during the
mentoring job. However, the research cannot be considered a high quality evidence due to
lack of research rigor and consideration of credibility of research findings.

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References:
Chow, S.C., Shao, J., Wang, H. and Lokhnygina, Y., 2017. Sample size calculations in
clinical research. Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Hart, C., 2018. Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Research Imagination. Sage.
Machi, L.A. and McEvoy, B.T., 2016. The literature review: Six steps to success. Corwin
Press.
Sarma, S.K., 2015. Qualitative research: Examining the misconceptions. South Asian Journal
of Management, 22(3), p.176.
Suresh, K., Thomas, S.V. and Suresh, G., 2011. Design, data analysis and sampling
techniques for clinical research. Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology, 14(4), p.287.
University of Greenwich 2018. Rangasamy Ven Veeramah details. Retrieved from:
https://www.gre.ac.uk/people/rep/faculty-of-education-and-health/dr-ven-veeramah
Veeramah, V., 2012. What are the barriers to good mentoring?. Nursing times, 108(39),
pp.12-15.
Yip, C., Han, N.L.R. and Sng, B.L., 2016. Legal and ethical issues in research. Indian journal
of anaesthesia, 60(9), p.684.

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