This three part series of articles provides a brief overview of relevant research designs in nursing. The first article in the series presents the most frequently used quantitative research designs. Strategies for non-experimental and experimental research designs used to generate and refine nursing knowledge are described. In addition, the importance of quantitative designs and the role they p...

My reasoning behind focusing on narratives as both the object and method of inquiry should be clear from the previous considerations around ontology. To sum up: “Stories are dynamic, changeable, never the same. Yet they convey something about what we believe to be stable in the world. They say something about us as individuals, cultural creatures, historical beings. They shape our actions and a...

One of the most powerful predictors of violent political conflict is proximate violence in space and time. This spatiotemporal pattern has been identified between countries as well as within them. What explains this clustering is less clear, and different studies point to dif ferent mechanisms. Focusing on sub Saharan African states, we exam ine whether population attitudes may contribute to th...

Optimally designing radiotherapy and radiosurgery treatments to increase the likelihood of a successful recovery from cancer is an important application of operations research. Researchers have been hindered by the lack of academic software that supports head-to-head comparisons of different techniques, and this article addresses the inherent difficulties of designing and implementing an academ...

A number of techniques have been developed to effectively extract and generalize planning knowledge based on expert demonstration. In this paper we consider a complementary approach to learning in which we may execute experiments designed to test hypothesized planning knowledge. In particular, we describe an algorithm that automatically generates experiments to test assertions about plan-step o...

Identifying the causal impact of some variables X on y is difficult in the best of circumstances, but faces seemingly insurmountable problems in observational data, where X is not manipulable by the researcher and cannot be randomly assigned. Nevertheless, estimating such an impact or “treatment effect” is the goal of much research, even much research that carefully states all findings in terms...