The literature review serves as the introduction to your project, and the justification for your research. Refer to the examples in the text, slides and “Examples” folder for guidance, and follow these guidelines:
Requirements:
The Introduction section should be 300-500 words. and should include 3-5 paragraphs. Make sure you include the following:
1. Discuss the general background of the problem. Stress the magnitude of the problem or the societal burden of the disease (such as rates, percentages, prevalence..etc.).
2. Outline what is known about the problem. Discuss past literature and provide references.
3. Outline what is not known about the problem. Discuss past literature (and/or lack of past literature) and provide references wherever possible.
NOTE: If there is very little or nothing already published about the problem, you can discuss the exposure and outcome separately and then explain why you suspect they are associated with each other. For example, there is an established association between stress and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Emergency room personnel work in a stressful environment. Therefore, it would be reasonable to study CVD in emergency room personnel, so you would present background on all of these things to connect them and justify your research.
4. Identify gaps in past research. For example, studies that are no longer relevant, were small, used a different study design, did not include the same condition or disease, could not be generalized to other demographic characteristics such as gender/race/geographic region, etc. This is not an exhaustive list, there are many possibilities that you need to think about as you review the literature and decide where there are holes.
5. An explanation of why this gap in past literature is important and relevant to study now. End the Introduction section with the purpose of your study such as “The purpose of this study is to compare the rates of cardiovascular disease in emergency room works to other hospital occupations”.
6. Make sure you include references as you write and use APA formatting.
IMPORTANT:
- Do not use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to write this section or any other part of your thesis, except to help you develop ideas. Please do not copy/paste a summary from AI tools or any of your own previous writings, as that will also be treated as plagiarism. The Turnitin tool in Blackboard, used for your complete thesis drafts in the last few weeks of the semester, may be used to produce an AI report if it is thought to be necessary.
- Always write in the third person in scientific writing. If you are uncertain what that means, read about it here.
- Avoid the word “explore”. Exploring is not the same as answering a research question.
This section, as well as the other three sections of your project, will be submitted in stages over the semester. This first draft will be considered a rough draft. You will be required to work with a tutor this week, in order to get the most obvious problems worked out first. Subsequent drafts will be reviewed by your peers and by the professor.
The Methods section should be 300-500 words and should contain at least 3 paragraphs. Refer to the Methods sections in the articles you reviewed in your literature review for guidance and the examples posted this week, and follow these guidelines:
Please include:
1. Your study design.
2. A description of your study population, how you will identify or have identified them in your dataset. If this is a secondary dataset (such as NHANES, HINTS, SAMHDA or other similar data), you can summarize the information the previous researchers reported when they collected the data initially. Also, include information about where they were recruited. Make sure you include any inclusion/exclusion criteria, and definitions. For example, if your study focused on elderly women, what is the definition of an elderly woman? If your study focused on men with poor health, how is poor health defined?
3. A description of how the data were collected for the dataset you will be using. If this is a secondary dataset, you can summarize the information the previous researchers reported when they collected the data initially. If you collected your own data, describe that process (i.e. two questionnaires mailed to parents of children with heart defects, one at enrollment and one at 2 year follow-up as well as details about how the questionnaires were collected, data entry and management).
4. A description of the variables you will analyze in your dataset. For example, if you are studying the association between lung cancer and smoking, you might be using one variable in your dataset that has a yes/no response for smoking status, as well as a variable that shows the number of years the participant reported smoking. You might also use a variable that shows a diagnosis of lung cancer, where 1=yes and 2=no. Also discuss any demographic variables you will use, such as gender and age.
NOTE: The full data analysis section will be covered next week. You do not need to go into detail about this section here. The data analysis piece will be added to your Methods section later.
A data analysis plan is a requirement of most research proposals. Since you have not yet begun to analyze your data, I would like you to spend some time thinking about how you will do that. All your analyses should be directly related to your research question, and should appear in this order:
1. Research Question: Restate your research question that you included in your project outline. Make sure you revise the question if that was a comment you received from me (you can find that in the Gradebook).
2. Description: Begin with a written description of how you intend to conduct your analysis. First, this should begin with a description of how you will present the demographics of your sample (you will probably show numbers and percentages of males and females, and other categories that are descriptive). Second, after describing how you will analyze demographics, you will need to explain how you will analyze the data in a way that addresses the research question. This could be as simple as something like this: “Survival times will be recorded in days, and mean survival time will be compared between the treatment groups. Differences in means will be tested using t-tests”. If you intend to compare groups of participants, then describe that here as well. Basically, anything you are planning to learn from your analysis should be described here. Use the Methods sections of the publications posted in Week 5 for guidance.
3. Dummy Tables: Please see the guide for how to design your tables in the “Dummy Tables” document posted this week. You will need to Include at least 2 dummy tables in your data analysis plan: a) Show demographic variables, and b) show some kind of analysis that addresses your research question. Do not put ANY numbers or results in the tables. A dummy table is a shell, with no results. (If you took PBH740, you might remember seeing this when you developed your final project).
Please attach your data analysis plan as a Word document.
4. Comment on one other student’s data analysis plan. Let them know if you find the analysis clear or not, and if you have any suggestions for improvement.
The Results section should be 300-500 words. Refer to the Results sections in the examples from published studies posted above for guidance, and follow these guidelines:
Please include:
1. The number of participants in your study. If you are doing a Randomized Control Trial, report the number in the treatment group(s) and number in the control or placebo group.
2. A description of your study sample (gender distribution, race, age groups or mean age…and any other variables that describe the participant’s characteristics). This usually just means describing what is being shown in Table 1, which is the table that most study results start with. You will need to provide this table here. See examples of these tables in the articles I have posted under “Examples” above. Hopefully, you already created this in your data analysis plan. This is your chance to fill the empty cells with your actual analysis results.
3. A description of the results of your analysis. For example, if you compared the test scores of patient group A with patient group B, then you might report the mean and standard deviation of each, then whether they were significantly different or not. This would be accompanied by the p-value. This result, along with any others would be presented in the text AND in Table 2 (as well as Table 3, 4….etc.). Hopefully, you already created this in your data analysis plan. This is your chance to fill the empty cells with your actual analysis results.
4. The most important result to be reported in this section is the one(s) that addressed your research question. For example, if your research question was “Do patients on medication A feel less pain after surgery than patients on medication B”?, then you need to tell the reader the answer. The answer could be presented several ways, depending on how you analyzed the data. So, you could report that “Patients on med. A experienced 8% less pain within 1-2 days post surgery, but experienced the same pain relief as med. B 3 or more days post surgery.” Whatever the results were, they should be illustrated in the accompanying tables.
5. Do not include any comments that interpret the results, just provide the facts! Interpretation can be discussed at length in the Discussion section.
The Discussion section should be 300-500 words. Refer to the Discussion sections in the examples from published studies posted above for guidance, and follow these guidelines:
Please include:
1. The answer to the research question.
2. How your results were different from past research.
3. How your results were similar to past research.
4. Strengths and limitations of your study
5. Direction of future research in your topic area. This should include suggested way to address the limitations you just discussed in #4.
Additional thoughts and guidelines can be found in the reading by Cals, et al. as well as the examples posted in the Required Readings folder this week.
IMPORTANT:
Do not repeat a description of the results. This should have already been explained in the Results section.