Report on the article byBoulding et al. Relationship between patient satisfaction with inpatient care and hospital readmission within 30 days. Am J Manag Care. 2011:17(1):41-48. Read the article focus
HAD-505
Guide to preparing a report on a published research paper, Part-I
This document provides direction for preparing a written report describing the content of a peer-reviewed published report of a quantitative research study. In particular it includes descriptions of five key elements found in most published research reports. It is intended as a guide for identifying and describing these elements when preparing reports of published study #1 for HAD-505. This guide can also be used as a basis for providing feedback and comment to fellow students preparing reports as partial fulfillment of the requirements of the course.
Note, you may need to do some detective work to identify the essential details of these elements in a published paper. Authors do not always make it easy by explicitly labeling these elements and not all journal editors require that they be described in great detail.
Read the article carefully and identify each of these key elements.
Prepare a written report describing each of the following five elements.
Background and need for the study
This tells the reader why the problem being studied is important enough to study. In other words, it tells us why we should care about the research results. This also can be used to justify a request for funds to conduct the research (e.g., a grant application or internal budget request). This information will be found in the introduction (or background) section of the published report.
Statement of the problem being studied
This is a simple statement of the health, clinical, or financial problem that needs to be better understood. This is the “big picture” description of the problem the authors’ research addresses, but it is not the specific hypothesis, which they tested. The problem is usually described in the background or introduction sections of the paper, but you may need to tease it out of the longer background discussion. If the study is well done, the results will contribute to our understanding of some aspect of “the problem” (its cause, magnitude, or possible solutions), but any single study is unlikely to completely resolve the problem by itself. Examples of the problem being studied might include the high prevalence of obesity in the US, high rates of readmission to the hospital shortly after discharge, the cost of treating chronic hepatitis patients, or the fact that barriers to purchasing health insurance among US adults are not well understood.
Research question or hypotheses
The research question is a specific question to be answered, usually in statistical terms, by the research. This defines one specific aspect of “the problem” that was studied and reported in the article. One example of a research question may be: “Is smoking associated with lung cancer?” (High incidence rates of lung cancer may be the larger “problem” in this example.) On the other hand, a “hypothesis” is a specific statement which can be expressed in unambiguous terms; the validity of which can be tested. One example of a testable hypothesis is: “Cigarette smoking is associated with increased lung cancer risk.” (NB: the hypothesis is a statement that can be tested; it is not expressed as a question.)
Research method/design
The research method is a description of the basic design of the study. This tells the reader whether the study is an experiment (e.g., a randomized clinical trial), a quasi-experiment, an observational study, or any one of a variety of qualitative study designs. For observational studies, some additional description of the type of observational study is expected. Examples of observational study designs include: cross-sectional studies, cohort studies and case:control studies. A description of the study design should also include mention of the source(s) of the data to be analyzed. Common sources of research data include: data explicitly collected for this study, existing data collected for another study or purpose (in which case the authors’ study was a secondary analysis of existing data) or some combination of the two. The specific statistical analyses planned are not considered part of the study design. Statistical analyses are considered in item 2.g below.
Population, sample, and participants
It should be possible to describe the population studied, the sample used and the actual participants in a well written research report. The population is that group (patients, healthcare providers, hospitals, clinics, insurers, etc.) to which the results of the research can be applied. If the study is done properly, the results reveal some truth about the population. The sample is a subset of the population selected for analysis. If the sample is selected properly, conclusions based on data from the sample can be applied to the larger population. The participants are those subjects whose data are actually included in the analysis. The participants may consist of all subjects in the sample. However, the group of subjects included in the analysis is often a subset of the sample: limited to those subjects for which complete data can be obtained. For example in human clinical research, the participants may be that subset of the “sample” who provided written consent to participate (or allow their data to be used) in the study. Caution, the author may misuse these terms, especially population and sample. In particular, the sample is often described as the “study population”.
Summary of the paper
In addition to describing the elements listed above, HAD-505 students reporting on a published research study must include a brief summary of the whole article in 300 words or less. This summary is not limited to a discussion of the five key elements defined above. It is to be an objective description of the authors’ work. It is not an evaluation or critique of the published paper. Rather, using your own words, you will describe 1) the reason the study was conducted, 2) the key methods used, 3) the main results, 4) the author’s interpretation of the results, 5) a summary of the authors’ discussion, and 6) your interpretation of the main results. The abstract, found on the first page of a published paper, may be a good basis for creating a summary of the authors’ work.
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