Draft Prospectus Development of the prospectus is an iterative process that lays the foundation for your DPI Project. The prospectus will also assist your project chair in providing valuable feedback

PICOT

To what extent does a competency-based behavioral intervention offered to adult patients with advanced cancer, improve _pain_ at a healthcare care center in West Montgomery over a period of 4 weeks?

The selected research design applicable to the direct practice improvement project is quantitative, quasi-experimental. Quasi-experiments are studies that aim to evaluate interventions but that do not use randomization. Similar to randomized trials, quasi-experiments aim to demonstrate causality between an intervention and an outcome (McLeod, 2019). The target group is adults with advanced cancer in a health care facility in West Montgomery. This design was chosen, because both pre- and post-intervention pain scores will be measured. c

The intervention group will receive the competency-based behavioral intervention and the control group will not receive the competency-based behavioral intervention. This helps make inferences about the possible existence of a cause and effect relationship of the intervention.

A quasi-experimental research design is used to evaluate the benefits of specific interventions, which is what the direct practice improvement (DPI) project entails.

Pain scores will be rated on a scale of 1-10 before and after the competency based behavior intervention.

Reference

McLeod, S. A. (2019, July 30). Qualitative vs. quantitative research. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/qualitative-quantitative.html

Implementing a quantitative research method is best for my project because quantitative studies analyze numerical data, and use statistical methods to analyze averages, frequencies, patterns, and correlations between variables (Boeren, 2017). My project will be collecting numerical data.

Descriptive research is a type of research that describes a population, situation, or phenomenon that is being studied. It focuses on answering the how, what, when, and where questions If a research problem, rather than the why.

Correlational – exams how two or more variables could be related but limits how one variable could impact the others.

I plan to use Quasi-experimental in my project due to my targeted population and interventional impact. Quasi-experimental is a research method used in the design of an experiment of an empirical study used to estimate the causal impact of an intervention on its target population (Bloomfield, 2019). In the case of my DPI, the effect of competency based behavioral intervention on pain scores would be examined.

Reference

Bloomfield, J., & Fisher, M. J. (2019). Quantitative research design. Journal of the Australasian Rehabilitation Nurses’ Association (JARNA), 22(2), 27–30. doi:10.33235/jarna.22.2.27-30

Boeren, E. (2017). The methodological underdog: A review of quantitative research in the adult education journals. Adult Education Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1177/07417713617739347