Question

State if the following are quantitative or qualitative and justify your reason.

1- A clinic is considering improvements in patient satisfaction and wants to conduct an in-depth study to describe american patient experiences in the waiting room of the Emergency Department

2- Healthpoint Hospital has a dental unit where they also conduct orthopedic surgery, and want to develop a model to explain the psycho-social needs of special needs patients who remain in the intensive care unit

3- A medical city in recognizing that there is a growing elderly population, wants to study how effective their pain management program has been, for relieving pain among the elderly patients who have received surgery there

4- The Nutrition Department at Imperial College London wants to study the incidence and severity of nausea among patients who receive a combination of viral therapy due to infection, and they want to explore patterns of nausea in relation to the patient’s characteristics

Answer 1

1. A qualitative study would be most appropriate in this case, because the clinic aims to investigate the topic in depth.

2. A qualitative study would be most appropriate in this case, as the hospital aims to generate a theory.

3. A quantitative study would be appropriate in this case as the researcher wants to investigate a specific variable (pain) which can be measured on a scale.

4. A quantitative study would be most appropriate in this context because they researcher wants to work with numerical data (finding incidence and severity).