Qualitative Research Question Paper

Refine and Refocus Until the Study is Right

Conducting simple qualitative research requires constant refinement of the interview process and, even, the research questions. Patient education is an important part of nursing care; however, novice nurses may not be well-prepared for the task. Two primary research questions guide this simple qualitative study: 1) Does the inability to effectively teach stem from lack of accomplishing competency in nursing school? 2) Are there teaching techniques that better assist the student nurse to teach patients? These research questions can further be broken into four sub-questions: 1) Are the student nurses being taught how to teach patients? 2) Are nursing instructors role modeling effective teaching techniques?

In the first four questions, general experiences are sought with the student nurse answering from patient experiences. In the second four questions, the student nurse answers more specific questions. The first four questions include: 1) Can you describe a time when you were a patient and received education from a nurse? What stood out? 2) In your experience as a patient, did nurses use any identifiable teaching techniques, props, or aides? 3) How does the use of teaching techniques, props, and aids enhance the patient education? 4) As a patient, what are some concerns you have had about what or how a nurse taught you? The second set of questions include: 1) As a nurse, can you describe a time when you were uncomfortable educating a patient? Why were you uncomfortable? How did you address the situation? 2) While you were in nursing school, were you taught teaching method for patient education? 3) Are you comfortable adjusting teaching material to fit the needs of the patient's disease process, prognosis, education level, and previous knowledge? 4) What advice would you give a fellow nurse on how to prepare for patient education? Using these research questions, the need for patient education will be established along with the effectiveness of different methods of

The original interviewee had been a nurse for ten years. Asking a person to recall how she was educated ten years prior did not aid in the phenomena occurring at present. Even though the nurse admitted she felt uncomfortable educating patients when she was a novice nurse, the nurse is no longer a novice and has developed her practice over time to become an expert in her field. This would be consistent with Benner’s nursing theory-novice to expert (Davis & Maisano, 2016). Using Benner’s definition of a novice nurse, only nurses who have been practicing for less than two years would be interviewed. This exclusionary criterion would help link the interview questions to the research questions because the novice nurse would have similar experiences as a fourth-year student nurse. The novice nurse is still learning tasks and time management skills; this nurse depends on her knowledge from nursing school and has not assimilated new concepts with those she learned in nursing school as seen with experiential learners (Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 2015). An expert nurse would add new concepts to her knowledge base; through evidence-based research the nurse would change her old practices that may not be best practice into current best practice. The novice nurse should have current best practice knowledge. Using this premise, the research questions, are students being taught how to teach their patient in