Evidence-based practice is essential in nursing. It serves as the basis of nursing care being used today. To enable nurses further to improve such care, research becomes a necessity. One way of ensuring research study is useable and effective is by critically appraising it. This paper aims to correctly and systematically critique a chosen qualitative research article by scrutinizing its part one by one and providing a concluding comments at the end.
Title and abstract
A qualitative research article’s title should compose of a central phenomenon and a group under study. It should also contain the context of the study and the research design used. More importantly it should be short and concise but long enough to convey the …show more content…
Since the study focuses on human experiences, it is appropriate to use the semi structured interview as a means of collecting subjective data. Participants were 20 pregnant women in their first trimester and still contemplating on nuchal translucency screening. Polit and Beck (2006) argue that phenomenological studies usually use 10 or less people to serve as a sample. Hawthorne and Ahern’s sample contradicts having 10 more. The interview process took place on each of the participants’ homes for about 70 minutes. Some were interviewed in their workplace during lunch break. It could be argued that some interviews could be rushed and therefore may result in inaccuracy. Conducting an interview in a workplace also does not provide privacy and a decent environment and this may have irritated some of the respondents. Follow up interviews were also conducted which may indicate some of the respondents’ unwillingness to participate. Interviewers were also not described and training for the interviewers was also not mentioned. The semi structured interview starts off with the interviewers asking general and broad questions where the respondents come in and relate their own experience. The interviewers let them lead on, sharing past experiences, opening new aspects of the topic, and raising their own ideas on particular …show more content…
One example is the finding in which mothers did not feel closer to their baby when seeing a visualization of their child during the scan was contradictory to a similar study conducted 7 years ago. Another finding is the mothers’ different views and definition of being a ‘good’ mother were seen being selfish than reaching out to their unborn child. Moreover, it reflects the respondents’ awareness of the developing the risk. This contradicts to another study as well. This section also presented a limitation of the study in which it explained that these contradictions arose because of the timing of the study, having it done before screening took place. One similarity with other studies was the finding in which formed friendships had a great impact on the decision of the respondents towards the