The Practice of Nursing Research and Munro's Statistical Methods for Healthcare Research

The next two textbooks that I have read and reviewed were 'The Practice of Nursing Research Appraisal, Synthesis and Generation of Evidence' and 'Munro's Statistical Methods for Healthcare Research'. The Munro textbook is one that teaches about all the math that one may need to do research in this area. The other textbook is one where authors show their experiences in writing and doing research.

'The Practice of Nursing Research Appraisal, Synthesis and Generation of Evidence' is a textbook this one being the Seventh edition created by three women by the names of Susan K. Grove, Nancy Burns, and Jennifer R. Gray. They all share their knowledge and experience in writing and doing research. This book covers in explicit detail and in using a small typeface and a two-column layout per page will begin with how to start doing research clear through to when a nurse researcher will be searching and asking for grants and needed funds to do their research.

There are sample research proposals, interviews, along with review questions and data sets and activities to get researchers thinking. 'The Practice of Nursing Research' as well as what is meant by nursing research is all discussed in this text reference book. The specific audience for this textbook is for the graduate nursing students who are interested in doing research and teaching nursing. The content is accurate and to me there were no errors for doing any kind of research for one must try and remember to keep up with editorial changes, as in working with citing references for that always seems to change quite a bit from year to year it seems for and in doing research and the roles that one has to play.

It is a book that does have illustrations, tables and diagrams to help in explaining the necessary concepts in each chapter. There is also a complete glossary of all the terms throughout the textbook as well as in the sections of completed research projects dealing with a particular chapter. This is a text of how to do research for I found there were no use of offensive language that was used against race, creed or ethnicity in any way or no controversial material or outdated information given. Remember though there will always be changes to some mechanics of grammar and usage especially in the ways of citing references for it as mentioned earlier they always seem to change. The diagrams and charts that were shown were using different colors to show the information in a different manner. Each section and chapter is color coded so that the reader/student will be able to go to the section that they need to read to pursue a certain part of doing research whether they are just starting or ready to do a literature search or ready to prepare a presentation in some way. There is even a review on doing the necessary statistical applications and rules.

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Now for the fun textbook known as Munro's Statistical Methods for Healthcare Research in the Sixth edition created by Stacey Plichta Kellar and Elizabeth A. Kelvin who created this Statistics textbook. This is a book that covers the basics and the areas in learning and understanding all about data from the historical facts and from empirical research that has been done to show the types of research. Let's get started.

The students will learn how to organize, display and describe their data and learn the various symbols that are required in doing their necessary calculations for their research studies. They will about frequency distributions to all types of graphs and displays like the stem and leaf display. All through the textbook the authors will also show the reader what SPSS as well as SAS is all about and how this statistical program will be a big help to them in doing their research. This is also a textbook that covers all the different ways to analyze data from doing an ANOVA, ANCOVA, and even MANCOVA it even shows and describes in detail these like t-tests and z-tests and correlational coefficients and other specific tests that are or maybe needed for research projects like the Spearman G and the Wilcoxon. Moving on through the textbook it will also show how to build a model research and making a presentation.

There are a number of appendices covering the idea of critical values of the various tests and there are even various terms, questions and problems at the end of each chapter for the student to define, answer and work out to further understanding the concepts of the chapters. Each chapter also has charts and diagrams describing visually what the textbook is describing in words. The glossary is one that gives good definitions for all the terms. The typeface that is used for the textbook is normal pica type and easy to read in a two-column format. This being a statistics textbook it is mainly for showing and explaining how to make all the necessary calculations for a research project and/or presentation to make the research project pleasing to the eye for the final presentation to an audience. There is no controversial material but maybe in deciding which way or method is better to use for a particular kind of project. There is also no offensive language used in the text unless you are the kind of person who does not like math one way or another. To be honest I am not a math person in figuring out various calculations, but I am one that likes the vocabulary of mathematics and I relearned and reviewed what I learned in my Statistics and other math courses and now I like this area.

(Please read, comment and maybe offer a tip for it would be greatly appreciated.)