Category: Evidence based practice
Conducting a literature review: example table of articles found from your search strategy
Once you have found all the articles relevant to the topic, review them and record your findings in a table like the ones below. This will make it easy to pick out the themes and write your discussion, as well as identifying failings in research method making the articles less reliable.
| Study: Craun SW and Bourke ML (2014) The Use of Humor to Cope with Secondary Traumatic Stress. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse 23(7): 840–852.
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| Aim | Type of Methodology
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Themes identified
(eg staff or patients) |
| Finding | Strengths/ Weaknesses of Method
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| Magazine Article: Brown A-L (2015) Laughter is the best medicine: from clown doctor to occupational therapist. Australian Occupational Therapy Journal 62(6): 29–29.
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| Aim | Type of Methodology
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Themes identified
(eg staff or patients) |
| Finding | Strengths/ Weaknesses of Method
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Protected: Conducting a literature review: example introduction (discussion of the topic background)
Protected: Conducting a literature review: example introduction (discussion of the topic background)
Creating a research proposal: Triangulation, WTF
Yes WTF is triangulation. Sounds mathematical and more suited to an airline pilot than an occupational therapist.
In one sense it’s using points in a triangle shape to pinpoint a location more precisely, but the sense we’re concerned about here is the social science sense. Really simply it’s using two or more sources of data to make the results more valid.
Protected: Conducting a literature review: example discussion of the themes identified (incl appraisal of the article quality)
Creating a research proposal: deciding on the sample
The sample is the people you will experiment on in your research to obtain results. In an ideal world the study should examine an unbiased representative mini-chunk of the actual population, so that the results can easily be extrapolated and applied to the real world. To get your sample as close to the real world as possible, you must consider:
- sample size
- who should be in your sample?
- the ethics of all this experimenting on the poor sample people
Client-Centred Care & Ethical Dilemmas
Client-centred care (or patient-centred care or patient preference) is one of the core philosophies underpinning Occupational Therapy. In any modern healthcare practice, it also forms part of the Evidence Based Practice (EBP) equation:
Research + Clinician Expertise + Patient Preference = EBP
How much weight each part of the formula should contribute to the overall treatment ‘answer’ is not clear cut, and when an extreme weighting from one or another element is proposed, it causes ethical dilemmas. Ethical dilemmas cannot be solved alone, but through collaboration with colleagues and professional body standards (such as the RCOT).
I find myself almost never listening to Radio 1 anymore instead tuning in to BBC 6, BBC 2 and even 4… is this a reflection of becoming more interesting or more boring? Or that I need talk radio to keep me awake on the more frequent long car journeys I seem to do now? Either way, in the BBC 4 programme ‘Inside the Ethics Committee’ one episode discusses a woman who wants her leg amputated in order to forego any further knee surgeries. Read more
Menu: Conducting a literature review
Clicking on the category to the right ‘How to conduct a literature review’ does bring up all blog posts related to doing a lit review, but there were getting to be too many to keep track of the order.
So this is just a menu of all the blog posts related to writing a literature review, and also EBP in general, so they are in some kind of order and all in one place.
EBP:
What is Evidence Based Practice? Why does it matter in everyday life?
Barriers to Evidence Based Practice
Article review: “Evidence-based medicine: a movement in crisis?” by Greenhalgh et al (2014)
Conducting a literature review:
Conducting a literature review: Where do I look for evidence to use in my Evidence Based Practice?
Conducting a literature review: creating a good question
Protected: All aboot Statistics
Article review: “Articulating an Occupational Perspective” by Njelesani et al (2014)
This article investigated uses of the term “occupational perspective” in order to clarify a standard definition for use in occupational science. This should make it easier to apply occupational science research findings in practice, the authors argue. In the end they came up with
“a way of looking at or thinking about human doing”
What is an occupational perspective then? According to the authors it’s not an occupational therapy perspective, since this term was one of the exclusion criteria in the Method section. The authors describe in the Findings the term as being used in relation to employment until the 90s when it became associated with Occupational Therapy and Occupational Science. Research investigating it is mainly qualitative suggesting it is something abstract perhaps also explaining why there were so many different interpretations of the term in the articles Njelesani et al (2014) shortlisted. The research on occupational perspective covered a wide variety of client populations indicating it’s a concept that applies to all people with disabilities/illness.
Conducting a literature review: creating a good question
Questions can be created to answer a question in practice, or as an aim for research, so you must be clear which goal you are aiming for!
For both, you must first think of the question in narrative format, that describes the purpose and aim of your review.
Then you need to break down the narrative question (using PICOT, SPICE, ECLIPSE or SPIDER tools) so you can identify each concept that needs to be searched for. To create a good research question, there are different tools you can use as a guide to identify the different concepts your question is made up of. Each of them is best suited to a different type of aim and question:
PICOT tool (Riva et al 2012) for clinical quantitative diagnosis-type questions, where there are two well-defined alternatives you are comparing. Eg. Does medication A more effectively reduce glaucoma in adults aged over 70 than medication B?
SPICE tool (Booth 2004, 2006) for intervention qualitative evidence-type questions, especially where there’s policy or practical implications to consider,
such as whether a policy/intervention has improved patient health or not.
Eg. Do hip fracture patients who stay in hospital for over four days recover more quickly on wards where staff have completed a training course in compassionate care?
ECLIPSE tool (Wildridge & Bell 2002) for health service questions, especially where exploring relevant information rather than comparing two options. Eg. Has the new advertising campaign run by the Stop Smoking Service resulted in increased smoking cessation amongst smokers as reported by GPs ?
SPIDER tool (Cooke et al 2012) for qualitative-type questions, focusing on study design and samples more than interventions. Eg What are young parents’ experiences of attending antenatal education?
Examples of questions produced from these tools can be found here. Fink (1998) asserts that a good search will attempt to use MeSH terms (Medical Subject Headings), which are a bit like using a thesaurus to find similar words so you can ensure you’re not missing out anything in your search because someone else calls it by a different name!
