Methods Used in the Evidence Based Project

Study Design

The study design that will be used in this project is quasi-experimental. As it is the case of quasi-experimental design, the participants in this research will not be randomly assigned but will be selected from a predetermined group (Portela et al., 2014). White & Sabarwal (2014) note that quasi-experimental designs are usually utilized to test causal hypotheses. The program which is implemented in the design is considered as an intervention. Regarding the ethical issues of the experiment, quasi-experimental designs allow for impact evaluation. Moreover, by using pre-existing groups, the methods avoid the ethical concerns that are always associated with random assignments (White & Sabarwal, 2014).

Setting/Sample

The investigation setting will be in the South Florida Clinic. This healthcare institution has been chosen because it provides dialysis care to their patients. Consequently, a sample population of 67 patients undergoing dialysis will be involved in the study. The participants will be the individuals who are 45 years old and more. The investigator will cooperate closely with the hospital’s administration and the nursing staff working in the dialysis department to identify the people who have attained the requisite age. Afterwards, such individuals will be approached, explained the objectives of the study and requested to take part in it. Then the investigation team will let the participants know that they have a right to refuse if they do not want to take part in the study.

Confidentiality

The participants’ will have their names concealed with the aim to enhance their confidentiality. Each participant will have a unique computer-generated code. Thus, the subjects will be referred to by the codes instead of names, with all the documents being completed using these. Besides, the information provided by them will be kept in a locked safe, with no unauthorized personnel allowed to access it.

Procedures/Intervention

In the project, the psychological education on depression and anxiety will applied to the study the participants. Specifically, the one-group pretest-posttest design of the quasi-experimental design will be used. This is one of the most frequently used approaches where a single pretest measurement is taken while an intervention is implemented with a subsequent posttest measurement taken after it. The pretest-posttest design will be applied to only that one group which will be in the experimental condition. Performing the pretest will provide the investigator with an opportunity to have the information about what will happen should the intervention (psychological education) not be incorporated as planned. The pretest-posttest experiment will also be run to see if the proposed psychological education being examined will cause the predicted changes in the subjects. Since everyone will be manipulated in the same way, it is believed that the changes that will take place across the group of participants will be those resulting from the manipulation. Therefore, they will be tested before doing the experiment; thereafter, the experimental manipulation will be run, and then the subjects will be tested again to determine if there are any noticeable changes.

Instruments/scales and Measurement of Outcomes

The participants will be provided with a rating scale to record the changes they will notice after the implementation of the intervention (psychological education). The stepped wedge design will be used because it has various stages that can help to record the level of satisfaction with the proposed intervention strategy (Copas et al., 2015). There will be the strata levels of numbers ranging from 1, which will be the least effect after the intervention, to 4 representing the most notable effect after the intervention is applied. The changes will be measured using a mixed design method with both qualitative and quantitative strategies to evaluation. The information from the rating will be estimated quantitatively, especially during data analysis. However, the qualitative data will also be used to infer what sort of readings is contained in the quantitative information. The stepped-wedge design is valid and applicable because it has successfully been used in the intervention programs before. Moreover, the stepped-wedge design has been reliably used to evaluate the population impact of interventions previously used in the individualized studies of the similar kind. Also, the design has been found to support a flexible data analysis and include the temporal variations that are associated with the intervention effects.

Data Collection

The study participants will be provided with the stepped-wedge forms where they will record the intervention outcomes. The forms will have a rating from 1 to 4 as described above. There will also be pre-test data collection that will give the participants’ the feeling and perception of the possible feasible outcome before the intervention. The posttest data will be collected afterwards and analyzed using an appropriate statistical package. The outcome of the analysis will then be compared with the pre-test information to determine if the changes occur following the implementation of the intervention.

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