Nursing Research BSN

Daytonite, BSN, RN · Jun 16, 2007

Hi, krisbowlbowling!

I haven't seen any specific information on the Internet about this. Most everyone in a BSN program has had to take this class and has been in the same boat. Use your textbook as a guide. You'll also need information from your statistics class which you should have already taken. I discovered that the university where I was attending had a corner in its library where it had dissertations and theses written by doctoral and PhD candidates in years past as well as ones by some well known names (Bill Cosby's PhD dissertation was there!). It's worth it to take the time to find this collection in your school's library (ask the librarian where it is) and pull one or two of these and scan through them to see how they are put together. It doesn't matter if you don't understand what in the blazes the writer is talking about. You want to see how the work is constructed and, in particular, what is at the very beginning of it, the literature search. When you look at research articles in professional journals you are often only seeing abridged versions of the actual work.

In my research class we had to submit a proposal for research that included a literature search and proposal for research. Most of this involves everything that is in a research project but the actual research itself, statistical results and discussion and analysis of the results with suggestions for further research. We had to do it all again in my senior seminar class! Because I was near a large medical college that had an extensive health sciences library, I spent some time there going through nursing journals looking at research articles. When I found one of interest I looked up the articles in the bibliographies of these articles, read them and so on. What I discovered was that many of the researchers writing about the same subject were using the same groupings of articles upon which to base their literature searches. I eventually wrote to one researcher and she was very kind to send me a copy of her complete research and testing tool which I included with the paper I turned in to my professor.

My advice: if you have to do a similar project (and it's quite likely you will), do not wait until a week before the paper is due to start working on it. Begin work on it immediately. Even if you only put a few hours a week into it, you'll have already planned out your subject and started doing the reading on it. Don't dwell on what subject to start with. You'll only get delayed. Just start reading articles until you find one that seems interesting. Your instructors are mainly going to interested in your getting the process of how to do research. The subject becomes important when you are getting your doctorate or PhD because it will be your area of specialty. If you are in a BSN program you are a generalist at this point in your career. In my case I had to block out special time to visit that medical school library. I was the only one in my class that did it, but it paid off big time for me with the grade that I got.

Some years later I helped two friends, one in medical school and one in pharmacy school, type and format their research they had completed as part of their doctoral programs. Each had followed that same research format that I learned back in my nursing research class. The subjects were interesting to me because they were medically based. As I was typing them into the computer I could see how the literature supported the premise for the research question and proposal. When you get into the working world you may end up working in a facility that employs nurses who do research like I did. You'll get to be part of their data collection process and rub shoulders with these people and ask yourself "why do they do this if they're not even in school anymore?" But, you'll at least understand what it is that is going on! :lol2: The reason, by the way, is to receive grant money for the facility that comes from various government entities and corporations. Money in the till is money that the facility can spend for things it needs.

Have fun!

Welcome to allnurses! :welcome: