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Which of the following groups would be best served by the development of a scientific base for
nursing practice?
A) Nursing administrators
B) Practicing nurses
C) Nurses' clients
D) Health care policymakers - Answers C.
An especially important goal for the nursing profession is to do which of the following?
A) Conduct research to better understand the context of nursing practice
B) Establish a solid base of evidence for practice through disciplined research
C) Document the role nursing serves in society
D) Establish research priorities - Answers B
Which of the following is a fundamental belief of those who hold to the constructivist paradigm?
A) A fixed reality exists in nature for humans to understand
B) The nature of reality has changed over time
C) Reality is multiply constructed and multiply interpreted by humans
D) Reality cannot be studied empirically - Answers C
Which of the following is a fundamental belief of those who hold to the positivist paradigm?
A) The researcher is objective and independent of those being studied
B) The researcher cannot interact with those being studied
C) The researcher instructs those being studied to be objective in providing information
D) The distance between the researcher and those being researched is minimized to enhance the
interactive process - Answers A
Which of the following attributes is least characteristic of the traditional scientific method?
A) Control over external factors
B) Systematic measurement and observation of natural phenomena
C) Testing of hunches deduced from theory or prior research
D) Emphasis on a holistic view of a phenomenon, studied in a rich context - Answers D
Empiricism refers to which of the following?
A) Making generalizations from specific observations
B) Articulating a study purpose in terms of an appropriate classification system
C) Gathering evidence about real-world phenomena through the senses
D) Verifying the assumptions on which the study was based - Answers C
Which of the following is a hallmark of the scientific method?
A) Rigorous
B) Holistic
C) Systematic
D) Flexible - Answers D
Which of the following limits the capacity of the scientific method to answer questions about
humans?
A) The necessity of departing from traditional beliefs
B) The difficulty of accurately measuring complex human traits
C) The lack of funding for research
D) The shortage of theories about human behavior - Answers B
The classic scientific method has its intellectual roots in which of the following?
A) Positivism
B) Determinism
C) Constructivism
D) Empiricism - Answers A
Constructivist qualitative research typically does which of the following?
A) Involves deductive processes
B) Attempts to control the research context to better understand the phenomenon being studied
C) Involves gathering narrative, subjective materials
D) Focuses on numeric information - Answers C
Quantitative and qualitative research share which of the following features? Select all that apply.
, A) A desire to understand the true state of human affairs
B) An emphasis on formal measurement
C) A reliance on external evidence collected through the senses
D) Utility to the nursing profession - Answers A, C, D
Which of the following is a descriptive question that a qualitative researcher most likely would ask?
A) What is the nature of this phenomenon?
B) What is the average intensity of this phenomenon?
C) How frequently does this phenomenon occur?
D) What is the average duration of this phenomenon? - Answers A
A researcher wants to investigate the effect of patients' body position on blood pressure. The study
would most likely be of which type?
A) Qualitative
B) Quantitative
C) Either quantitative or qualitative (researcher preference)
D) Insufficient information to determine - Answers B
A researcher wants to explore the process by which men make decisions about treatment for prostate
cancer. The researcher's paradigm is most likely which of the following?
A) Positivism
B) Determinism
C) Empiricism
D) Constructivism - Answers D
Which of the following would be most strongly associated with cause-probing research?
A) Identification
B) Description
C) Exploration
D) Explanation - Answers D
Nursing has experienced constant change over the past decades as a result of increased research.
When determining best practices, nursing decisions should do which of the following? Select all that
apply.
A) Be based on tradition
B) Include holistic approaches
C) Be clinically appropriate
D) Be cost effective - Answers C, D
Evidenced-based nursing primarily uses which of the following to answer clinical questions?
A) Consulting an authority
B) Using intuition
C) Obtaining the newest research
D) Relying on experience - Answers C
The major difference between quantitative and qualitative research is that qualitative research seeks
to find answers based on which of the following?
A) Solid factual data
B) Experiences or descriptions
C) Etiology
D) Systematic process - Answers B
Which of the following research focuses is qualitative?
A) Weekend and night outcomes of patients admitted to a specific hospital system's trauma
departments
B) Trends in hospitalizations of patients with antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis
C) Predicting risks for serious complications with abdominal surgery
D) Needs of nursing students living with chronic illness - Answers D
When little is known about a phenomenon or the phenomenon is not clearly identified, the best type
of research suited to uncover this is which of the following?
A) Exploration
B) Description
C) Identification
D) Prediction - Answers C
Consumers of research do which of the following?