Reasoning
Moving from generalized principles known to be true to a true and specific conclusion
What is deductive reasoning?
Name the variables in this statement: "The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of nurses workload on hand hygiene compliance"
What are workload and hand hygiene compliance?
This definition describes the abstract meaning of a concept being studied
What is a conceptual definition?
These describe the characteristics of a given set of data
What are descriptive statistics?
This lowest level of measurement involves using numbers simply to categorize attributes; the numbers do not have quantitative meaning and cannot be treated mathematically
What is nominal measurement?
Deductive reasoning is associated with this type of research
What is quantitative research?
Examples of variables that involve placing people into a category
What are gender, blood type?
This definition specifies how the variable will be measured
What is an operational definition?
These make inferences about the larger population based on data collected from a sample or samples
What are inferential statistics?
This level of measurement ranks people on an attribute, for example measuring the ability to perform an activity based on identified levels of 1-5, with each number signifying an incremental ability
What is ordinal measurement?
This type of reasoning moves from specific instances into a generalized conclusion
What is inductive reasoning?
This variable is the outcome that researchers want to understand, explain, or predict
What is the dependent variable?
This refers to the accuracy of information obtained in a study
What is reliability?
This refers to the likelihood or probability that a statistic derived from a sample is not due to chance, and represents some genuine phenomenon in the population from which the sample was collected
What is statistical significance?
This distribution is an arrangement of values from lowest to highest and a count or percentage of how many times each value occurred
Polit p 229-230
What is a frequency distribution?
"Margaret is a teacher. Margaret is 65 years old. All teachers are 65 years old" is an example of which type of reasoning which can be false
What is inductive reasoning?
Name the independent variable in a study which is undertaken to determine if the length of time a student sleeps affects test scores
What is length of time spent sleeping?
This refers to the soundness of a study's evidence
What is validity?
This summarizes the average amount of deviation of values from the mean and can be interpreted as a degree of error when using a mean to describe an entire sample
Polit p 233
What is standard deviation?
This is the highest minus the lowest score
What is the range?
"All noble gases are stable and helium is a noble gas, so helium is stable" is an example of this type of reasoning
What is deductive?
The independent variable corresponds to this part of the PICO scheme
What is I - intervention, influence, or exposure?
These are used to test hypotheses and to evaluate the reliability of findings
What are statistical tests?
This is the range of values within which a population parameter is estimated to lie, at a specified probability, e.g. 95% or 99%
What is a confidence interval?
These are the three indexes of central tendency
What are the mean, median, and mode?