Читать книгу Demystifying Research for Medical and Healthcare Students - John L. Anderson - Страница 50

You can see clearly that these real‐life experiments we have looked at above are quantitative – they all use numerical data! They are clearly hypothetico‐deductive – they had a clear purpose and set of expectations in mind before they began. They are in the interventional domain – they introduced an experimental variable which was not there at the start; from Snow removing the handle of the water pump to Egbert et al. providing additional information to surgical patients. They are prospective – they all had a start point where they made their initial measurements, they had their interventions, and they had an end point when they made their final measurements. And they were all conducted outside of the lab!

 You can see that Snow’s ‘experiment’ was a single‐arm one – He believed that if he removed the pump handle, then people would not be able to drink contaminated water. He did it and the cases reduced.

 The Paddington Station and the Brighton Tunnel experiments were good examples of testing behaviour in public places. Their ‘interventions’ – an actor in different roles in Paddington, and different music, in Brighton, evoked different behaviours which were filmed, noted, and measured.

 Egbert used the everyday practice of preparing patients for operations as an opportunity to add an intervention – special briefing – and then to note and measure the impact of this in comparison with no special briefing.

 McKinley, in Boston, used actors as the ‘interventions’ and by noting physician’s responses to different actors was able to determine how actors from different ethnic/racial backgrounds were treated in different ways.

Research is the art of the possible!