Essay question - Working with women in labour: Describe each of the stages of labour including the relevant physiological, behavioural, and emotional changes the woman may experience. Critically discuss how the midwife can support the woman throughout each stage and the impact the birthing environment may have on the woman.
Finding your search terms is part of the Ask and Acquire stage in evidence based practice. Look at the Ask section on the Evidence based practice page on this subject guide for more information on how to use PICO to find your key concepts, and at the Acquire section to find out how to develop your search terms. A brief example is shown below.
Start planning your search by:
You may need to alter your search terms if you don't find what you need.
| Keywords | Alternative terms |
| "stages of labour" | "stages of labor", labour, labor, childbirth, delivery, birth, dilation, parturition, afterbirth, placenta |
| midwife | midwives, midwifery |
| "birthing environment" | "birthing room", "birthing suite", "birth space", "physical environment", sorroundings, lighting, noise |
Now use Boolean operators to connect your search terms.
Use OR to combine all the terms for the same concept: labour OR labor
Use AND to combine terms from different concepts: midwifery AND childbirth
Use quotation marks to search for a phrase: "birthing environment"
Use an asterisk to retrieve variations on a word: midwif* = midwife, midwives, midwifery
Use brackets to group all terms from the same concept together: (support OR care)
Watch the following video to learn more about Boolean operators
When you put it together:
Example 1: (midwifery OR midwives OR midwife) AND (support OR care) AND (“stages of labor” OR “stages of labour” OR dilation OR delivery OR birth OR afterbirth OR placenta)
Example 2: (labor OR labour OR childbirth OR delivery OR birth OR parturition) AND (impact OR effect) AND (“birthing environment” OR “birthing room” OR “birth suite” OR “birth space” OR “physical environment” OR surroundings OR lighting OR noise) AND NOT politic*
Please note: These examples are intended to demonstrate two possible search strategies. They do not include all possible keywords or variations on search strategies. You will probably need to alter your keywords/search terms as you go and conduct many searches to retrieve all the information you will need to answer all areas of your topic.
Suggested databases for this assignment are:
When was the article published? Check the assessment instructions to see if a date range has been given. Generally for nursing, more recent articles are preferred because new and updated information may have come out.
How old are the references? Has the article referred to other fairly recent articles?
How old is the data used? Check to see if the data was collected a long time before the study was published. If it has been, do the authors explain why this was?
Is this information relevant to your assignment? Is there likely to be better information? This will depend on what you are trying to find out. Often you will need to read the abstract to find out.
Is this aimed at the correct audience? Articles for this assessment should be peer reviewed. If you are not sure, you can copy and paste the title into Quicksearch to see if the purple peer review icon shows in the result:
Alternatively, you can check the journal title in Ulrichs. If it has a small black icon that looks like a book next to the title, it is peer reviewed (called refereed in Ulrichs).
Who wrote it? What are their qualifications? Are the qualifications relevant to the topic? Most peer reviewed articles will have information about the authors, often at the end or hyperlinked, with their qualifications listed.
Where do they work? Who do they work for? Generally, authors should be working for a university or a research centre of some kind.
Are they likely to have a good understanding of this field?
What is the study population size and characteristics? Keep in mind this is dependent on the study type, for example qualitative studies usually have smaller study populations than quantitative. The population does need to be fairly similar however, to enable accurate results and to make sure any effects reported are due to the treatment. For example, a treatment for back pain may look more effective if the group receiving the treatment is much younger than the group that doesn't.
Is there a control group? This is a group that does not receive the treatment, and allows the researchers to compare them to the group getting the treatment to see if it works.
Is there blinding? This is where the control and treatment groups do not know whether they are getting the intervention or not. Remember though that this might not be possible for some interventions, for example researchers testing a new vaccine can give the control group a saline solution instead of the vaccine, but if they are testing a new massage technique it is almost impossible for the participants to be unaware if they received a massage or not!
Do the statistics make sense and match the authors' claims?
For more information on evaluating specific study types, please see the Appraise tab on the Evidence Based Practice page of this guide.
Who funded the study? Is it a company, university or research organisation? If it is a company, do they manufacture a product being tested? If you are not sure, can always search for them on the internet. If the URL ends in .com, it is a company.
Is there any obvious bias where the authors or their employers are likely to benefit from the study recommendations? For example, if the authors work for a particular company and recommend the use of one of their products, this could indicate a risk of bias.
Does it state what the authors' were trying to find out? The research aims or questions should be clearly stated in the beginning of the article, and the conclusions should describe what they found out.
The following PDFs are helpful for creating your assignment.
FedCite is the one stop shop for all your referencing needs. In nursing, you need to use APA 7. Look at the Using APA7 section to find out general information on how to cite and reference, and the source types for specific examples.
In this assignment, you need to reference peer-reviewed journal articles. The table below summarises how to reference journal articles from FedCite.
| Citation | Reference | |
| Article with 1 author |
Recent studies indicate that . . . (Carbonaro, 2012). Carbonaro (2012) contends that . . . |
Author. (Year). Article title. Journal Name, vol(issue), xx–xx. DOI or URL Carbonation, L. A. (2012). Can we use MR-mammography to predict nodal status? European Journal of Radiology, 81(1), 17-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0720-048X(12)70007-4 |
| Article with 2 authors |
. . . identifies skills intrinsic to current nursing practitioners (Felton & Royal, 2015). Felton and Royal (2015) argue that . . |
Author. (Year). Article title. Journal Name, vol(issue), xx–xx. DOI or URL Felton, A., & Royal, J. (2015). Skills for nursing practice: Development of clinical skills in pre-registration nurse education. Nurse Education in Practice, 15(1), 38-43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2014.11.009 |
| Article with 3-20 authors |
. . . outlining the thought processes (Demacheva et al., 2012). Demacheva et al. (2012) outlined the through processes relevant to ... |
Author. (Year). Article title. Journal Name, vol(issue), xx–xx. DOI Demacheva, I., Ladouceur, M., Steinberg, E., Pogossova, G., & Raz, A. (2012). The applied cognitive psychology of attention: A step closer to understanding magic tricks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26(4), 541-549. https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.2825 |
| Article without a doi |
|
Author. (Year). Article title. Journal Name, vol(issue), xx–xx. Walker, B., & Buchbinder, R. (1997). Most commonly used methods of detecting spinal subluxation and the preferred term for its description: A survey of chiropractors in Victoria, Australia. Journal of Manipulative & Physiological Therapeutics, 20(9), 583-589. |
Further information:
Check out the APA 7th ed. Style Blog (Style and Grammar Guidelines tab) for more advice and examples of in-text citations and complete references.