Need a good idea for a research proposal

Nursing Students Student Assist

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Hi all,

I recently started a 5 week nursing research class, at the end of which we will have to submit a 10 page research proposal. Next semester we will need to complete the results of the research along with the paper. I was just wondering if anyone had any research ideas that are not only interesting, but would also be helpful to the nursing profession. I am really looking for something that is manageable in the next 4 weeks. Since I have never actually tried my hand at "research" with all the questionnaires, statistics, and results. Therefore, I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions regarding sites that are helpful. Thanks in advance for any help.

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Specializes in RN, Cardiac Step Down/Tele Unit.

Yikes! That sounds like quite a project! Does it have to be quantitative research? If not, qualitative might be easier to do. You could do something with nurses' job satisfaction at different hospitals in your area, or on different units at the same hospital. Or you could do an observational study to see how many nurses wash/foam their hands before and after entering patient rooms. Right now I am helping the hospital where I have my residency audit charts to see how nurses are complying with the policies for documenting pain. I will be putting together an educational poster based on the results. Good luck to you!

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Specializes in med/surg, telemetry, IV therapy, mgmt.

when i was doing this project for school we were told to pull research articles and also look at the bibliographies of each article and pull those references as well and read them. when you read these same articles you may find you have another question you feel needs to be asked and tested. keep in mind that all research is based upon previous research efforts. what i found was that i wasn't able to know what i was going to propose to test until after i had done a whole bunch of reading. the reading helps you to refine your thinking on the subject. it is way easier to do some reading and decide on a subject than to pick a subject and try to find articles to fit it. places to look for articles are in the recent editions of the specialty nursing journals and ajn. most all of the journals published by the nursing specialties have research based articles in them. so, pick a field of nursing that interests you. this page has a list of the various nursing journals that are published: http://www.nursingcenter.com/library/index.asp#journals you can get another list of journals that publish nursing research at this website: http://www.studentnurses.com/research/journals.html something else that comes to my mind is that in nursing diagnosis handbook: a guide to planning care, 7th edition, by betty j. ackley and gail b. ladwig, many of the nursing interventions include references to nursing research. so, if you are inclined to keep to something that involves basic nursing, check the hundreds of references they used in their book. some of them are listed on their nursing diagnosis pages that you can access at this website: http://www1.us.elsevierhealth.com/evolve/ackley/ndh7e/constructor/index.php#diagnoses any way you look at it, you are going to need to spend some time pulling articles and reading them.

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Thanks so much for your info... I am already realizing how much time this is going to take... but I appreciate your quick reply

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