This assessment task is designed so students can demonstrate their understandings from Week 1, Week 2, Week 3 and Week 4 and obtain feedback on any problem areas at an early stage. You do not need to...

Week 1
In the study of Quantitative Research Methods, the first week was about introduction to the use of statistics in the study of disease in populations. Taylor, Kermode and Roberts (2007) said that research design not only guides the researcher in ca
ying out the study but also provides the researchers certain help that guides him through the research. The week 1 helped us by making us familiar to the research theory and processes. There were articles and few abstracts to read and analyze so that it becomes easier to write a research proposal in the future.
Certain abstracts were given to read, abstract 1 on the article by Liou and Cheng (2010) was a descriptive study. This study was about the nurses in Taiwan, how they feel about the work environment in the organisation they work and how this affects their job and efficiency. The study was based on the Strinegr’s Organizational Climate Questionnaire which was filled by 486 nurses and the data obtained was analyzed. The results indicated that the nurses were mostly satisfied with their work place and its environment which increased their work efficacy and decreased their intention to leave the job.
The second abstract for consideration as an exploratory study done on how telephonic interventions can improve the outcomes of heart failure in a particular community. This study proved that if nursing intervention was done in home and community settings then the hospital visits of the patients suffering from heart diseases decreased. The study was done by assigning nurses to call up the heart failure patients telephonically and intervene which showed that the hospital readmissions were lower than the comparison group.
The third abstract was an explanatory study by Peters (2006) that analyzed if there is a relationship between racism, chromic stress, emotions and blood pressure. The researchers used pre-formed Performa’s to analyze 162 community-dwelling adults. They concluded that racism led to stress and was associated with chronic emotions but not with BP. On the other hand, emotion-focused coping was strongly associated with chronic stress emotions but not BP.
The last abstract was based on a predictive study by Woo et al. (2009) who assessed the number of falls in people above 65 years to predict the number of falls. After the analysis, they concluded that in men the falls were mostly due to low energy levels and clumsiness in both hands and in females feeling emotionally low was the reason.
The abstracts from different articles indicated the importance of obtaining data from a large sample size and then analyzing it for formulating a trustworthy result.
Week 2
The second week discussed about the quantitative research methods by discussing about epidemiology and the basic measurements in quantitative research. epidemiology also known as quantitative research deals with the patterns of disease that occur in humans and the factors that affect these patterns. Epidemiologists are mostly concerned about the time, place and person in relation...