research nightmare

I echo classicdame. You're going to have to tell us a little more for us to be of much hellp.

Start by looking at your course materials and reviewing the specific instructions for the assignment. Also read the relevant sections of your textbook and any course materials that apply. That should give you an idea as to what is expected of you. If you don't understand the instructions, you'll have to ask your instructor about that.

But once you get the instructions clear and share them with us, then we can probably help a little.

Thanks for the additional information. That makes it a whole lot easier to give you a few suggestions.

1. To help narrow down your topic ... I strongly suggest a trip to the library. If you have access to a really good online nursing library, that will be fine, but you should probably go to a health sciences library in person if all you can do is Google stuff. You'll need to access several of the major nursing journals and browse the books that relate to your topic.

2. Pick 2 or 3 general topics of interest to you. Don't try to narrow it down too far yet. Keep it general. Browse the library and look to see how much research has been done on the topic ... what type of research has been done ... etc. As you do that, let your mind wander and imagine what a possible research project would like to write your proposal about. Your goal of this "browsing the literature" phase is to narrow down your topic to a specific topic. Also, the literature you find as you browse will be the beginnng of your literature review.

3. For your assignment, you need to do a formal literature review. So, after you have browsed and narrowed down your topic, do a formal search on that topic. Your textbook and other course materials should include directions on how to do a literature search. Briefly summarize the literature in the way consistent with the stated instructions for your assignment.

4. Form a research question on that topic based on the information you gained from your literature review. What other information would be helpful to know? What research has not yet been done that would be of use for nurses to know? etc. Since you know you want to use a qualitative method, you will need to be sure that your research question matches the method you are going to use. This is where most students make their big mistake: their question and their method don't match. That messes up the whole project. So, you'll probably need to review the different qualitative methods as you write your official research question to make sure you match them up.

4. Once you have a method and a question ... then the method will be your guide as to what steps would be needed to complete the research, which is a big part of what to include in your proposal. Your textbook and other course materials and instructor should be giving you guidance on the format for writing the proposal itself. But once again, the key to a good proposal (or project) is that everything matches and lines up with each other ... that all the steps of the research process are consistent with the research question and method selected. Research is a process and you can't go "all over the place" with it and expect to get the desired result. You have to methodically carry a set series of steps -- and the proposal is the written plan of that process.

I hope that helps.

llg, PhD, RN

Good luck!