ESSAY: Statistical study in nursing research.

Select one of the more common statistical tests used in nursing research for ‘Effect of educational techniques on hospital readmissions for heart failure patients.’ State which statistic you selected. What level of measurement is required for using your selected statistical test? Provide an example of how your selected statistical test could be used in a nursing research study.

ANSWER

Statistical Study in Nursing Research

The quality of any kind of qualitative or quantitative research depends on the statistical analysis methods used. Statistical tests used also show the credibility and usefulness of the information being presented (Goldberg, Morphis, Youssef & Gardner, 2017). In nursing research, many statistical tests provide evidence that a given study is reliable. This essay looks at such a statistical test used in nursing research for “Effect of educational techniques on hospital readmissions for heart failure patients”.

Selected Statistic

The chosen statistic used for the presented research question is paired t-test. This kind of statistical test is normally used when there is a need to compare the means of two populations/ two samples and observation in one sample can be extended to the observation in another sample. 

Level of Measurement Required

The level of measurement requires both nominal for the independent variable and interval for the dependent variable. In the case given, educational techniques are the independent variable while heart failure hospital readmissions are dependent variables.

Example of how the Statistical test could be used

To show the effectiveness of this statistical analysis, we assume a teaching and education program is implemented in a hospital. The education program can be centered on medication, modification of the diet and skills for self-monitoring. Follow-up nutritional education program was given as well. To determine whether the education programs are effective, readmission cases before the education intervention for patients with mixed demography in terms of age can be compared with those after the education program. While the usual characteristics of intervention as well as usual care patient cohorts can be compared using chi-square, for categorical such as age and continuous variables, the t-test can be used for analysis (Howie-Esquivel et al., 2015).  The unpaired t-test can also be used to compare the mean of the population of patients who were readmitted before the intervention and those who were readmitted after the education…