In your response post, present a brief, critical evaluation of at least one of your colleague’s assessment of the original research design. In your evaluation, identify whether or not you agree with your colleague’s assessment, explain why and identify any missing information if applicable. Provide 1 additional strength and weakness to his or her list. Then, comment on your colleague’s recommendation for an alternate research design approach, specifically addressing the strengths and weaknesses of their proposed design.
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Post:
The data collected for both quantitative and qualitative methods were done by observation research designs. However, the design methods were different.
The qualitative data were collected using more of a longitudinal design. All participants involved in the data collection were set to have two separate interviews over the one year period time, to include the additional interviews if the first interview couldn’t be completed in one session. A strength about this design is that it allowed the researchers to detect changes in the participants’ lives; however, the first interview was an unstructured interview and the lack of structure could lead to the researcher not gathering all the information needed answer the research question.
The quantitative data were collected using the case-control approach and the researchers were able to compare the lives of the patients with HIV against the controls, ones without known HIV statuses. One strength of this design is that the control patients were randomly selected within the population making it fairly representative and avoiding selection bias; however, a weakness is that the controls HIV status is not known compared to a HIV status of NO. I would infer that it is possible that some of controls could have HIV and not know it at the time of the study. In addition, it would of have been more accurate is the researchers did more of a matched case-control study. Matching of cases and controls minimized confounding factors.1
An alternative research design could be a cross-sectional design while collecting the qualitative data. Although similar to the longitudinal design, cross-sectional design would allow the researchers to collect data on the patients’ lives at the point of time.
REFERNECES
Sedgwick P. Why match in case-control studies? BMJ. 2012;344:e691. doi: 10.1136/bmj.e691.
