Question 1

You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

-Which of the following research terms can be used to describe this initial program?

A) Experimental research
B) Meta-analysis
C) Pilot study
D) Systematic review

Pilot study

Accepted Answer

A pilot study or program is a trial run conducted with a small sample in preparation for the major study or full-scale program. A pilot program provides useful information that enables decisions to be made about the future of the program. This trial-run program is not experimental research, which is a controlled study that tests a hypothesis. It is not a systematic review, which is an analytic review of all previously published research on a topic to answer a question. It is also not a meta-analysis, which is a statistical procedure that can be used in a systematic review to analyze the combined data from a group of previously reported studies that share a common hypothesis to provide a more powerful data analysis to test the hypothesis.

Question 2

You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

-The group of students in the IPE program represents a sample. What type of sample is best to use to achieve the highest level of external validity in the evaluation of this trial-run IPE program?

A) Purposive or judgmental
B) Random
C) Systematic
D) Convenience

Random

Accepted Answer

To provide meaningful results, the students assigned to the trial-run IPE program must be representative of the whole class, including the rest of the students who are not involved in the IPE program. External validity is the degree to which the results of a study can be generalized to the population (the dental hygiene class in this case), and is achieved when the sample (the IPE group) is representative of this population. Random sampling results in the most representative sample, thus providing the highest level of external validity. Systematic sampling involves the selection of subjects by including every nth person on a list. A systematic sample is not strictly a random sample, but it can be considered random when the list or file of members of the population is in random order and the first member of the sample is selected randomly. When possible, a random sample is best to use, but if a random sample is not possible, a randomly selected systematic sample is acceptable. Purposive (judgmental) sampling is one selected through personal judgment of the researcher. Convenience sampling is the use of a group of individuals who are most readily available to participate in a study. Purposive and convenience sampling result in biased samples, which have less external validity and can result in errors when applying research results outside of the research setting. Not listed as an answer choice is stratified random sampling. If the population is heterogeneous for one or more relevant characteristics such as age, sex, ethnic group, and incoming grade point average (GPA), a stratified random sample is best to use. This type of sample is selected by dividing the population into groups (called strata) according to the relevant variable such as age and then randomly selecting from each age group in such a way that the proportion of the variable in the sample matches its proportion in the population.

Question 3

You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

-To assess students' knowledge of community content, a comprehensive examination is administered at the end of the community oral health course. Consisting of 200 questions, the examination is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. What type of data is represented by these test scores?

A) Discrete; quantitative
B) Continuous; qualitative
C) Continuous; quantitative
D) Categorical and dichotomous; qualitative

Continuous; quantitative

Accepted Answer

Continuous data are numeric data that can be expressed by a large or infinite number of measures along a continuum, having real value when expressed as a fraction (e.g., test scores). Discrete data are numeric data with a set of fixed or finite values that can be counted only in whole numbers and in which fractions have no real meaning (e.g., number of teeth). Both continuous and discrete data are considered quantitative in nature. Categorical data have no numeric value, and each individual data point is assigned to a group or category. Dichotomous data are categorical with exactly two categories. Both categorical and dichotomous data are qualitative. Quantitative data are expressed with numbers and can be manipulated mathematically and analyzed with statistics. Qualitative data are expressed with language (words) and analyzed by reviewing responses for patterns or trends; an example is interview responses to open-ended questions.

Question 4

You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

-To assess students' knowledge of community content, a comprehensive examination is administered at the end of the community oral health course. Consisting of 200 questions, the examination is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. What type of data is represented by these test scores?

A) Discrete; quantitative
B) Continuous; qualitative
C) Continuous; quantitative
D) Categorical and dichotomous; qualitative

Continuous; quantitative

Accepted Answer

The mean is the arithmetic average of all scores. The median is the middle of the distribution of scores; placing the scores in order, as in this question, is required to be able identify the middle score. The mode is the score that occurs most frequently in a distribution of scores. For this distribution, the mean is 81, the median is 82.5, and the mode is 90. A distribution is bimodal when two scores occur with the same frequency; in this case, the score 90 occurs three times and 75 occurs twice, so only 90 is the mode. The value of 10 is the number of test scores; it is also called the frequency and can be reported with an abbreviation (e.g., n = 10 or f = 10).

Question 5

You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

-To assess students' knowledge of community content, a comprehensive examination is administered at the end of the community oral health course. Consisting of 200 questions, the examination is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. What type of data is represented by these test scores?

A) Discrete; quantitative
B) Continuous; qualitative
C) Continuous; quantitative
D) Categorical and dichotomous; qualitative

Continuous; quantitative

Accepted Answer

This distribution is negatively skewed. In a normal or symmetric distribution, the mean, median, and mode are the same value (e.g., 85). In a skewed distribution, values of the mean and median are larger than the mode in a positive skew or smaller than the mode in a negative skew, as in this case. A normal distribution of an attribute that is being measured assumes that approximately 68% of the scores are within one SD of the mean, approximately 95% are within two SDs of the mean, and 99% are within three SDs of the mean.

Question 6

You are a dental hygiene instructor in your local community college dental hygiene program teaching the community oral health course. The dean of the health sciences division would like to implement a trial run of an interprofessional education (IPE) initiative involving dental hygiene and the other healthcare professions education programs in the college. You are asked to coordinate the development and administration of dental hygiene's involvement through your community course and other community experiences in clinical and other courses. The intent is to place a group of dental hygiene students in the incoming class in the IPE program and use questionnaires, interviews, and examinations to collect and analyze process and outcomes data over their 2 years in the program to determine outcomes. Outcomes data will include students' learning of the required community oral health content in addition to their understanding, perceptions, attitudes, and future interest in relation to interprofessional collaborative practice (ICP). The data will be analyzed to evaluate the value and success of the program and to determine if it should be continued and expanded or discontinued after the initial 2 years.

-To assess students' knowledge of community content, a comprehensive examination is administered at the end of the community oral health course. Consisting of 200 questions, the examination is graded on a scale of 0 to 100. What type of data is represented by these test scores?

A) Discrete; quantitative
B) Continuous; qualitative
C) Continuous; quantitative
D) Categorical and dichotomous; qualitative

Continuous; quantitative

Accepted Answer

Procedures are necessary to control errors and ensure unbiased collection of data. Using standardized or validated measurement instruments is important to control bias and errors. Asking the same questions of all students in the IPE group during their exit interviews will also standardize the data collection process. Calibration will ensure intrarater reliability, which is consistency within each person who conducts interviews. Calibrating multiple examiners to one another will ensure interrater reliability, which is consistency among two or more people who are collecting data. Using only one interviewer can also prevent interrater variability. Other factors can also affect the validity of responses during data collection (interviews and questionnaires)-for example, time of day, setting of data collection, and personalities and biases of interviewers. These factors should be controlled and consistent for all students; when uncontrolled, these are referred to as extraneous variables and are sources of error. Other possible sources of error in this program evaluation are the use of a sample that is either too small or unrepresentative. With a small population, it is best to collect data from the entire population. For example, with only 10 students in the IPE group, data should be collected from all of them rather than from a sample of them. Control of extraneous variables is also important-for example, controlling the characteristics of the IPE students in comparison to the characteristics of the non-IPE students (age, sex, ethnic group, and incoming GPA).

Question 7

In a(n) _________ review, all previously published research studies that fit prespecified eligibility criteria are examined and combined to answer a precise research question.&#10;A)evidence-based&#10;B)systematic&#10;C)narrative&#10;D)analytic

Accepted Answer

In a systematic review, all previously published research studies that fit prespecified eligibility criteria are examined and combined to answer a precise research question.

Question 8

Literature sources that are original reports of new information are called __________ literature.&#10;A)primary&#10;B)secondary&#10;C)tertiary&#10;D)research

Accepted Answer

Primary literature sources are original reports of new information, representing original thinking and reporting a discovery.

Question 9

What is the term used to describe a statement that provides a proposed answer to the research question?&#10;A)Guess&#10;B)Estimate&#10;C)Analysis&#10;D)Hypothesis

Accepted Answer

After a research question is formulated, a hypothesis is developed. This is a statement that provides a proposed answer to the research question.

Question 10

The three major categories of research are qualitative, quantitative, and __________ methods.&#10;A)mixed&#10;B)dual&#10;C)physical&#10;D)biologic

Accepted Answer

The three major categories of research are qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods.

Question 11

The three main types of research designs used for oral health research are observational, experimental, and:&#10;A)institutional.&#10;B)social.&#10;C)quasi-experimental.&#10;D)physical.

Accepted Answer

The answer of The three main types of research designs...

Question 12

When the researcher is interested in studying two or more independent variables within the same study, a ___________ study is used.&#10;A)split-plot&#10;B)factorial&#10;C)pretest-posttest&#10;D)crossover

Accepted Answer

The answer of When the researcher is interested in studying...

Question 13

What is the term used to describe the entire group or whole unit of individuals having similar characteristics to which the results of an investigation can be inferred?&#10;A)Parameter&#10;B)Sample&#10;C)Control group&#10;D)Population

Accepted Answer

The answer of What is the term used to describe...

Question 14

What is the term used to describe a characteristic or concept that varies within the population under study?&#10;A)A variable&#10;B)A control&#10;C)Blinding&#10;D)A sample

Accepted Answer

The answer of What is the term used to describe...

Question 15

The two broad categories of statistics are descriptive and:&#10;A)nondescriptive.&#10;B)analytical.&#10;C)inferential.&#10;D)selective.

Accepted Answer

The answer of The two broad categories of statistics are...

Question 16

What is the term that is used to represent the exact middle score or value in an ordered distribution of scores?&#10;A)Median&#10;B)Average&#10;C)Mean&#10;D)Mode

Accepted Answer

The answer of What is the term that is used...

Deck 7: Applied Research