In an editorial in a previous issue of this journal Rapport et al introduced the metaphor of the edgelands, arguing that the area between urban and rural landscapes serves to illustrate some of the difficulties of interdisciplinarity experienced by those who work in the medical humanities. In this paper the authors explore some specific issues of qualitative research methodology in health care ...

Healthcare managers, clinical researchers and individual patients (and their physicians) manage variation differently to achieve different ends. First, managers are primarily concerned with the performance of care processes over time. Their time horizon is relatively short, and the improvements they are concerned with are pragmatic and 'holistic.' Their goal is to create processes that are stab...

College of Medicine. In these positions, he is responsible for conducting research in the area of Patient Safety and Quality of Care as well as teaching second-year medical students. Shewchuk is an expert, and teaches courses, in quantitative and qualitative research methods.

This study aimed to evaluate the quality of health care delivered in an Intensive Care Unit, concerning the use of pneumonia prevention and control measures in high-risk patients on mechanical ventilation. In this descriptive and exploratory research, 839 observations of patients under invasive ventilation care were carried out, between November 2009 and January 2010, using the Indicator of Eva...

Research on calibration remains a popular line of inquiry. Calibration is the degree of fit between a person's judgment of performance and his or her actual performance. Given the continued interest in this topic, the questions posed in this article are fruitful directions to pursue to help address gaps in calibration research. In this article, we have identified six research directions that if...

Design activities are fundamental to technological progress. Current design research holds tight to positivism, abandoned and critically opposed to by philosophers, mostly those outside the U.S. Maintaining the positivist view when conducting research leads to significant deficiencies in the quality of research, and to problems in transferring research results to practice. In spite of significa...

As the field of Psychology evolves there is much interest in understanding how educational practices can be shaped to facilitate the recruitment and engagement of students (Halpern and Hakel, 2010). Highlighting the multiplicity of research approaches within Psychology is one way in which to advance the field. Indeed, in her recent article Rees (2013) argues that the multiplicity of research to...

Research methods are set of rules to be followed to achieve ultimate research objectives. There are several research methods, such as case study, survey, action research and experimental. In this paper, the authors attempt to present the comparative study of two research methods for the data collection in the context of wireless sensor network.

More than twenty years after its conception, 'evidence-based medicine' (EBM) continues to invoke polarised debate. There are several areas of disagreement between EBM supporters and detractors as well as unanswered questions about the role of EBM in modern healthcare. Proponents suggest that the goal of EBM is to rescue medicine from many of its major ills, including wide variations in clinical...