Saturday, September 28, 2002: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM | |||
Methodological Issues in Intervention Research | |||
| Evaluating the effects of nursing interventions on desired, intended outcomes is critical for developing a sound knowledge base that guides practice. Intervention evaluation is often undertaken through a program of research with sequential phases, starting with pilot-work aimed at examining the feasibility of the intervention, and moving toward demonstrating its efficacy under controlled conditions, then its effectiveness under the conditions of everyday practice. Evaluating the effectiveness of interventions under the conditions of everyday practice, with clients presenting with various characteristics, and with nurses with various levels of knowledge and skills, present some challenges to researchers. The challenges stem from the difficulty in maintaining adequate experimental control, which is required to enhance the validity of conclusions. That is, the conditions of everyday practice are not amenable to experimental control, thereby introducing extraneous sources of variation in the outcomes and weakening the validity of the causal effects of the intervention on the outcomes. This symposium will address factors that can be encountered in everyday practice and influence the effectiveness of interventions. The factors are related to the characteristics of the clients, the nurses, and the intervention. Strategies for dealing with these factors will also be presented and illustrated with examples from an on-going study (1). The first paper reviews how and why client characteristics affect outcome achievement, and illustrates the points of discussion with empirical examples. The second paper explores the direct and indirect influence of the nurses’ personal and professional characteristics on outcomes. The third paper deals with issues associated with delivery of the intervention and examines how these issues influence the intervention effectiveness. The last paper presents strategies to account for these factors in effectiveness research, where experimental control is neither possible nor desirable. The advantages of these strategies in terms of enhancing the validity of conclusions are discussed. (1) funded by NINR | |||
| Organizer: | Souraya Sidani, RN, PhD, associate professor | ||
| Client characteristics: Extraneous or substantive factors? Souraya Sidani, RN, PhD, associate professor, Dana Epstein, RN, PhD, associate chief nurse for research, Patricia Moritz, RN, PhD, FAAN, associate professor and director | |||
| Influence of nurse characteristics in effectiveness research Patricia Moritz, RN, PhD, FAAN, associate professor and director, Souraya Sidani, RN, PhD, associate professor, Dana Epstein, RN, PhD, associate chief nurse for research | |||
| Methodological issues and safeguards in effectiveness research Maureen McClatchey, PhD, senior biostatistician, Patricia Moritz, RN, PhD, FAAN, associate professor and director, Souraya Sidani, RN, PhD, associate professor, Dana Epstein, RN, PhD, associate chief nurse for research | |||
| Strategies to Enhance Intervention Delivery under Real-world Conditions Dana Epstein, RN, PhD, associate chief nurse for research, Souraya Sidani, RN, PhD, associate professor, Patricia Moritz, RN, PhD, FAAN, associate professor and director | |||
The Advancing Nursing Practice Excellence: State of the Science