Evidence Synthesis and Tables

Recommendation from professor wk 1

I enjoyed reading your selected research study which addresses hospitalized patients with substance abuse disorders. You have offered some pertinent points in your discussion (good job!), but a few areas are still incomplete and will need to be better addressed for this week’s assignment. Allow me to offer some helpful guidance. For example, it is important to provide more specifics about the actual study, such as what type of qualitative study was conducted or at a minimum, how the data collection process occurred. There also appears to be an omission of the actual data findings which need to be added. You do accurately note that a data analysis occurred, but the details of this are missing. As you likely know, in qualitative studies, the findings are confirmed with the pertinent themes and/or patterns which emerged from the completed data analysis. In your selected article, three major themes were identified and discussed. Of these, which one do you believe was the most relevant and why? Your thoughts are important and will fully answer how the research design answered the scientific question(s). Additionally, more details of the limitations of the study should be discussed. Please refer to your Polit & Beck textbook for guidance. Another helpful suggestion…When you are discussing details of the study, please be sure to reference the authors’/researchers’ names as in-text citations for the sake of clarity in the sentences which will also meet APA requirements.

JH Evidence Summary Tool

You are off to a nice start, but a few of the columns are still incomplete. One helpful recommendation is that in the second column, be sure to add the doi locator number and the name of the database where you retrieved the article after it. Second, be sure your font and font size are consistent throughout the tool. Please be sure to watch the Course Orientation presentation by Dr. Olson that has been posted in the Announcements area this week. That information shows some excellent examples of what this tool should look like for a successful grade in this course. Please add the required information and repost this tool as soon as possible and let me know if you have questions.

APA Formatting

Your APA formatting is good with a few minor errors noted. Continue to use the APA resources located under the Resource tile on the course homepage to assist you with discussions and the important week 6 paper.

Wk 2 comments from professor

Thank you for a nicely written analysis of the Week 2 discussion assignment. You correctly identified a quantitative study that investigates alcohol consumption pattern and HIV suppression among individuals who are receiving care in Florida. This particular study generally relates to your chosen national topic from Week 1. Overall, this is a very good study and the breakdown of the demographics of the study participants using several tables is excellent. The sample was very large.

There are a few concerns about this article. As I have noted with other student submissions this week, the theoretical model is not properly identified. Second, the pertinent reliability information of the survey instruments is missing. The other concern is about the wide-ranging confidence intervals (CI) in the data…it is a little too wide. So, I went back to look at the results a little more closely and I noted a MAJOR red flag when the researchers discussed that approximately 9% of participants did not report or partially reported the use of illegal drugs in the past year. Instead of deleting those surveys from their study (which is what is expected), they note that to address the potential for biased estimates, multiple imputations were performed using fully conditional specification (FSC) method to generate 20 completed datasets. In other words, they filled in the missing responses themselves using other data. Wow! Can you appreciate that there could be an ethical concern with the actual findings? Remember that a survey must be completed by the participant in its entirety. That means they must answer every question themselves. If they leave questions blank and choose not the fully answer the survey, then that means that we (as the researchers) must completely discard that survey. We cannot use it. Yes, it is frustrating because our sample will be smaller. But we have an ethical obligation to discard an incomplete survey so that our results will be as accurate as possible.

JH Evidence Summary Tool

Your Johns Hopkins Evidence Summary tool is off to good start, but there are multiple issues with spacing, font size, etc. Additionally, the doi locator has been placed in the wrong column. Please refer to the samples provided by Dr. Olson and make the needed corrections to this tool as soon as possible. This will be very important as you prepare for your upcoming Week 6 paper.

APA Formatting

The APA formatting (both in-text and reference list) is mostly acceptable. Be sure capitalize the names of journal titles in the References list. Please continue to use your APA resources for all weekly discussions.

Wk 3 comments from professor

You have provided a wonderful, analytical analysis of a systematic review which collectively studies factors associated with mindfulness-based interventions in substance abuse disorders (SUDs) and behavioral addictions (BAs). This was a very interesting study to read.

One of the key concerns that the authors identify early is the clear criteria for inclusion and exclusion criteria for the selected studies. I cannot stress enough how important this aspect is when conducting research. If inclusion and exclusion criteria are not clearly specified, then serious problems with extraneous variables which were not accounted for in the methodological plan, can almost corrupt the final study results of a systematic review. The author undertook the task of assessing findings from numerous pilot studies involving trials (54 studies reported) which is a major challenge for any researcher. However, the final insights offered by the authors are significant. Overall, great work!

JH Evidence Summary Tool

Your summary tool is robust and commendable. You are doing great work populating the columns with needed information. The Times New Roman font and size are consistent throughout the document. As you continue to build your final summary tool, it will serve as an excellent resource of collated information for this class and in your future work.

APA Formatting

The use of in-text citations and reference list look good overall. You are doing very well with this requirement but remember (as a helpful hint) to capitalize the first word that follows a colon in a journal title. Please refer to your APA Manual for guidance as needed.