Quantitative Critical Appraisal

To commence this quantitative analysis the start point was to formulate a robust quantitative question in order to provide direction for the literature search. Newell & Burnard (2006) suggest that a strong question informs the research design, research method, the population, the intervention and the outcomes of interest. There are three factors for focusing questions 1. Facilitating the search for relevant evidence, 2. deciding whether the evidence is applicable to the group in question, and 3. sorting best evidence from weaker, less valid evidence (LoBiondo-Wood et al, 2002).

The question was framed around the elements of PICO; standing for “patients,” “intervention,” “comparison,” and “outcome” (Boston University Medline Plus, 2000a; Craig & Smyth, 2002). The PICO approach was developed around Evidence-Based Medicine (Richardson & Wilson, 1997), and was therefore designed for clinical studies, it can though be adapted to any research context.

| |
|People, patients or population - who are you asking the question about? |
|Intervention - what intervention are you interested in? |
|Control or comparison - what are you comparing the intervention to? |
|Outcome - what outcome are you interested in measuring? |

Table 1: PICO criterion
People or population of personal interest means the intended study subjects, for example,
Post qualifying nursing students studying Anaesthetic Practice.
Intervention generally means the aspect of the people or population that is the main