Research questions
Name
Institution affiliated
Research questions
Qualitative question
What are the student nurses’ experiences of their clinical practice? For this research question, the independent variables would be student nurses’ opinions of nursing education, sources of occupational anxiety, and their expectations of clinical experience. The dependent variable would be student nurses’ satisfaction with the clinical component of nursing education. A typical hypothesis would be: student nurses feel incompetent when taking care of patients because they lack the relevant clinical skills and competencies they are supposed to receive in the clinical component of their education. This hypothesis is causal because it proposes a cause and effect relationship between student nurses’ feeling of being competent and the clinical part of nursing education. It suggests that the lack of adequate clinical education and training results in the loss of confidence among student nurses.
Quantitative question
“The impact of sleep patterns on academic performance of college students” would be an excellent example of a quantitative research question. The dependent variable is academic performance measures like GPA, and the independent variable may include the number of hours of uninterrupted sleep. The hypothesis for this research question is that “the lack of adequate sleeping time may lead to poor academic performance among college students.” This hypothesis is associative. According to Rebar and Macnee (2011), associative hypotheses propose relationships between or among variables existing together in the real world. The association is such that a change in one of the variables also triggers a change in the other. In this example, the hypothesis proposes that the lack of adequate and uninterrupted sleep reduces academic performance. For instance, the fewer the hours a student sleeps uninterruptedly, the lower their GPA.
Reference
Rebar, C. R., & Macnee, C. L. (2011). Understanding nursing research. Wolters Kluwer/Lippincott Williams & Wilkins Health.