Assignment:
1. What is the difference in attitudes of male and female college students toward condoms?
• Identify an appropriate research design.
A research design that would work for this question is exploratory-descriptive qualitative research. This question promotes a potential problem of condom use where knowledge of the use may need to be addressed based on the attitudes of male versus female college students (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017).
• Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the design.
One weakness of this design is that you may get a large array of answers about attitude to this question that may be hard to classify. What if there is no opinion on the use of condoms, where would you classify that answer? This can also be a strength if the perception of condom use becomes something obvious such as access to condoms. Also, there is no way to tell if the college students are telling the truth due to the stigma of unprotected sex. Should culture, age and sexual orientation of the students being surveyed and also be taken into account and will these determinant factors skew the results?
• Provide a rationale for the design you selected
"Exploratory-descriptive qualitative researchers identify a specific lack of knowledge that can be addressed only through seeking the viewpoints of the people most affected" (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017, p.69). This study fits best with this design due to the researcher finding value in the participants perspective and how they can then form interventions to educate the college students based on their findings (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017).
1. What is the relationship between alcohol and breast cancer?
Identify an appropriate research design.
An appropriate research design for this research question would be descriptive correlational design since you are measuring the strength of the affiliation between variables (alcohol and breast cancer). It would be a noninterventional research study describing the relationship between the two variables (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017).
Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the design.
The strengths of this study include many research findings that link alcohol and breast cancer to support a trend in the relationship. Weakness in this study includes unknown and uncontrollable variables of the participants from previous studies or current. If you are only asking participants or using research with a relationship between these two variables you are leaving out many other risk factors that contribute to these participants risks for being at a higher probability for cancer; these risk factors include obesity, smoking, diet and exercise.
Provide a rationale for the design you selected
The rationale to use this design is based on the variables of alcohol and cancer and to be able to predict values of their relationship (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017).
1. What is the difference between self-efficacy scores in older adults who exercise and the scores of those who do not?
Identify an appropriate research design.
For this research question I would use comparative descriptive design since you are finding a difference between two things; those older adults that do exercise and those that do not (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017).
Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the design.
Weakness of this design are based on where you collect your data. If your subjects are in an active senior independent community compared to those in an assisted living facility you may get results that look beneficial to exercise or not. Also, there would need to be classification on what constitutes as exercise since the participants could have different opinions of this. Strengths of this study would be the self-efficacy scores could be simplistic and easy to compare on a numerical scale.
Provide a rationale for the design you selected
The rationale for this design is that it would be a quantitative non-interventional comparative research study which is used to compare differences (Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017).
Reference
Gray, J., Grove, S. & Sutherland, S. (2017). Burns & Grove's the Practice of Nursing
Research: Appraisal, Synthesis, and Generation of Evidence (8th ed.). St. Louis, MO: Elsevier.