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Nursing

Assignment Summary

This assessment requires you to complete:

A reflective discussion based on concepts raised by a movie: 

  • You are required to respond to several prompts to demonstrate understanding and knowledge of your own culture and that of First Nations Peoples.
  • You are required to find, read, and integrate a minimum of 10 contemporary academic sources such as journal articles, textbooks, and government websites.These should be no more than five (5) years old unless of historical significance and/or of specific relevant to the topic.

This assessment help page assumes you have read the unit outline, assessment description and marking rubric provided in Moodle.

Plan Your Search

Start planning your search by:

  1. Identify the key concepts in each question/discussion topic
  2. Consider alternative terms that authors might use for these
  3. You may need to alter your search terms if you don't find what you need
  4. You might need to make multiple separate smaller searches to address different points/issues.

Document your brainstorming to help you develop a search strategy:

Keyword Synonyms and alternative terms
cultural safety cultural respect
well-being social well-being, emotional well-being, health, mental health, physical health

Now use Boolean operators to connect your search terms. 

Use OR to combine all the terms for the same concept: wellbeing OR health

Use AND to combine terms from different concepts: cultural safety AND wellbeing

Use quotation marks to search for a phrase: "cultural safety"

Use parentheses (round brackets) to group all terms from the same concept together

(See the next tab, Developing a Search Strategy) for an example of using all these techniques together.

Watch the following video to learn more about Boolean operators

When you put it together:

(health OR healthcare OR wellbeing) AND (reflection OR reflective) AND (aborigin* OR "torres strait" OR indigenous OR "first nations")

Please note, this example is intended only to demonstrate search strategy techniques. You will probably need to alter your search terms as you go to cover all the areas in your assessment task.

Search For Resources


Suggested databases for this assignment are:

Do your references pass the CRAAP test?

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).

For more information on evaluating specific study types, please see the Appraise tab on the Evidence Based Practice page of this guide.

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?

For more information on evaluating specific study types, please see the Appraise tab on the Evidence Based Practice page of this guide.

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.

For more information on evaluating specific study types, please see the Appraise tab on the Evidence Based Practice page of this guide.

Referencing

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.