Impact of Communication on Safety in the Operating Room: Research Design

Impact of Communication on Safety in the Operating Room: Research Design

Experimental Design

Design of experiment is the most critical phase of the research, as the collection of data depends on the experiment. If a researcher fails to collect accurate or relevant data, entire analysis and results of research become questionable. Mostly, the research experiments are based on either quantitative or qualitative methods. These two methods are defined briefly as under:

Qualitative and Quantitative Research

Qualitative research is used for non numeric (mainly verbal) data, for example, to understand human behavior or analysis of patients' safety conditions in the hospital; this research methodology is subjective in nature. The researcher himself gets deeply involved in the research process and often acts as a participant. This type is essentially used at the beginning of the research process, when researchers try to find out that what kind of data they need and who will be the participants. The techniques used for in this type include conducting interviews, observing human subjects, and documentary analysis.

Quantitative research is used for numeric data, for example calculating average age of the female population. This is objective in nature. The techniques used for this research type focus more one collection of numeric data, such as conducting surveys, or getting the questionnaires filled.

In my point of view, for this research project, we may need to use both of the research methodologies (Qualitative and Quantitative). The data will be collected at the same time making it a concurrent study (Powers & Knapp, 2011). As we need to find out that how the patients' safety measurements and communications can be improved in the operating room, so we will have to conduct interviews and surveys. Qualitative Research would provide the complete and detailed description of ...