Month: October 2018

This week has been a journey or self-awareness and self-reflection.

First, I thoroughly enjoy reading the journal articles every week.  The temptation is still to jump to the discussion and conclusion and skip everything in between because I struggle to understand it anyways.  I am learning from the Plano-Clark and Cresswell (2015) text readings, so it isn’t that I abhor reading the text, but it is much more laborious reading.  And I still wrestle to understand the content.

First leadership revelation:  I am not comfortable evaluating or making decisions when I don’t understand.  And I am quick to get frustrated, and even agitated when people (including authors) don’t help me understand.  As I have done for the last number of weeks I read through my servant leadership article, found it engaging and enjoyable, and by the time I completed the evaluation I was frustrated and disillusioned because the authors did not clearly identify the criteria I was looking for.

I recognized that I have this same issue at work.  I have been a Physical Therapist for many years, and more recently, an Emergency Medical Responder.  Because of my role in my organization I oversee a number of different disciplines, including nurses (RN’s).  I am not a nurse.  But many times I am put in a position where I have to make a decision regarding nursing practice in Home Care.  Some nurses do an excellent job educating me regarding the best practice evidence, the safety concerns, the pros and cons – others cannot.  And when they can’t, I get frustrated.  But the RN’s that can’t provide rationale to my satisfaction are no different than these researchers.  They have a different background, they speak a different language, and they don’t necessarily know how to articulate their thoughts to their audience.  There is an onus on me to learn the scope and practice of nurses if I am going to have the privilege and responsibility of leading them, just as there is an onus on me to understand research if I am going to pursue a Masters degree.

Second leadership revelation:  in some areas of my life I just choose not to be Berean.  In Acts Chapter 17 Paul and Silas were sent to Berea, and in one statement it clearly describes the attitude and mindset of the people they met with there:

“Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11, New International Version, emphasis mine)

As a consumer of research, to my shame, I do not have this mindset.  I want to be able to take what the researcher(s) presents at face value.  I don’t want to examine, or search to determine if the research is true.  I just want to believe it.  And somewhere along the way I lost my will to be a critical thinker in this area.  I have critical thinking skills, and utilize those skills elsewhere, in both my professional and personal life.  But in the area of research, likely due to the difficulties in comprehending the information, I defaulted to an easier road of either just accepting the research findings, or not reading at all.

Interestingly I adopted this “wider road” early on in my Christian life and have had to spend a lot of time since “unlearning” a lot of false teaching that I just chose to believe.  After all, it was coming from the pulpit – it must be true.  I have since learned this was a dangerous approach.  Similarly, as referenced in the Unit 5 Summary (Strong, 2018) an article published in a reputable journal has caused false teaching on vaccines to be perpetuated now for 20 years.  It is also a dangerous approach to not be critical of research.  I might be frustrated, I might be struggling, but what I am learning in this course is important.

As in the last 2 week’s blogs, for the purposes of clarity I am going to use the headings as provided in the Unit 6 Assessment.

Part A

1. Discuss your evaluation of the research design in the servant leadership article chosen. Include the article reference, quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 1.

The article I chose to focus on this week was “Cultivating servant leaders in secondary schooling” by K.W. Chan and G.B.K. So (2017).  I chose this article because of my active involvement in my youth group and kids ministry at church (which is part of the reason why I struggle to get my blogs in by Friday at midnight because I always have Friday night commitments).

There is no reference to the research design in the article, and after reviewing the 4 research designs outline in chapter 9 of Plano-Clark & Cresswell (2015) numerous times I still did not land conclusively on what the research design actually was.  Again, my confidence in evaluating these criteria is limited.  (If any of the other students selected this article, I am hoping I can learn from their blog.)

(I am still trying to teach myself how to use this format to insert tables into my blog.  I don’t quite have it figured out yet.)

Part B

1. Discuss your evaluation of the participants and data collection procedures in the servant leadership article chosen. Include the quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 2.

On first reading I thought that this section would be easy to evaluate, but not so.  The data collection may be of a higher quality that the rating but I could not identify the criteria in the article itself; this may be due to inexperience rather than it not being present.

Table 2

Part C

1. Discuss your evaluation of the data analysis and findings in the servant leadership article chosen. Include the quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 3.

As in the quantitative research evaluation, this was probably the most difficult section because I don’t understand how the analyses are completed and when a certain analysis is appropriate or not.

Part D – Discussion Questions

As a consumer of research reports I think that the most important aspects that need to be considered in a qualitative research report are the same as a quantitative research report.  It is important to know that the research was done well and can withstand scrutiny.  Rigorous methods need to be used, and findings need to be interpreted objectively or the findings should not be considered new best practice nor incorporated into current practice.

As I indicated in the introduction to the blog, researchers speak a different language than the one I currently know.  Just like I would have to spend a long time learning French, or German and be fluent in it, it is going to take time and intentional study to understand “research speak”.  I suspect that criteria in the evaluation tools found in Plano-Clark and Cresswell (2015) are in the articles that I read, but I am not well-versed enough to find them.  Just because they aren’t spelled out explicitly doesn’t mean that they aren’t there.

As in Blog 4, I can apply this knowledge in my work context in the same way.  I need to be a critical consumer of research so that I can make evidence based, best practice decisions.  How I can apply it to my current leadership experience is outlined in my introduction.

My reflection this week has led me to a few questions that I need to contemplate further.  First, in light of our studies in LDRS 500, is critical thinking a necessary leadership skill?  Is the ability to think critically a leadership trait, or is it a learned behaviour, or can it be both?  How critical is too critical?  For example, if I am critically reviewing someone’s work, at what point does it just becoming an exercise in finding fault and no longer has any value?

I look forward to the discussion.

References

Plano-Clark, V. & Cresswell, J. (2015). Understanding research: A consumer’s guide (2^nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Chan, K.W.C., & So, G.B.K. (2017). Cultivating servant leaders in secondary schooling.  Servant Leadership: Theory and Practice, 7(10), 1-20.  Retrieved from http://www.sltpjournal.org/upload/2/6/3/9/26394582/03chan_so_vol_4_issue_1.pdf

Strong, H. (2018, Oct 23).  Unit 5 Summary [weblog comment].  Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/drheatherstrong/2018/10/21/unit-5-summary/

(P.S.  I did not know if the Unit 5 Summary would be considered a weblog comment.  I didn’t think it was a lecture note.  Please advise.)

This week I have a sincere appreciation for the consistency and standardization in the Plano and Clark (2015) text.  I actually have less confidence in my evaluation skills this week due to the content, but found that I was able to navigate through the evaluation tools a little easier because of the standardized format.  Despite my uncertainty and mental wrestling understanding the content I am in a better place this week because of the encouragement and exhortation from my fellow students and professor in this online learning platform.  I am just as overwhelmed, but not as discouraged.  Thank you to my learning community!

As in last week’s blog, for the purposes of clarity I am going to use the headings as provided in the Unit 5 Assessment.

Part A

1. Compare and contrast the elements of a methods and results section of qualitative and a quantitative research report.

I am borrowing a technique that I observed 2 colleagues use last week (credits to edenguessi, awalkinthewoods), and I am just going to insert this portion of the Figure from Plano-Clark and Cresswell (2015) as it is the most comprehensive way to display this information, and the easiest to understand.  (Unfortunately I just taught myself how to do this today, and can’t figure out how to make the picture larger so it is readable from the blog, so readers will need to click on it to view.)

Figure 1

Characteristics Typical of Quantitative and Qualitative Research – Methods and Results Sections Only

2. Discuss your evaluation of the research design in the servant leadership article chosen. Include the article reference, quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 1.

The article I chose to focus on this week was “Leadership purposefulness within servant leadership: examining the effect of servant leadership, leader follower-focus, leader goal-orientation, and leader purposefulness in a large U.S. healthcare organization” by J. A. Irving and J. Berndt (2017).  I chose this article because it is a topic that I am interested in and could be generalized to my work environment, however, in doing the evaluations this week I do feel that I bit off a little more than I could chew.

I would also like to make a note here that I think that the format of presenting the tables, and the rating that I observed my colleague use last week with the use of half-marks is actually better than mine (credit to awalkinthewoods).  I did teach myself how to present the table in this format (next week I have to teach myself how to make it larger), but in light of the fact that this is a course on research methodology, I decided to remain consistent and standardized in my rating this week.

Part B

3. Discuss your evaluation of the participants and data collection procedures in the servant leadership article chosen. Include the quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 2.

As was my experience last week I am attempting to find the criteria identified in the tools for rating, and when I cannot find the criteria my rating is low.  In many cases I think I am rating the elements too low because I am just not experienced in finding the criteria as outlined and since I don’t personally understand how research is conducted I might be expecting more out of these research studies than can be possibly be completed in one study.

Based on personal experience I struggled with the statement that this was a random sample (see Table 1).  If I understand the study correctly there was quite a lot of survey information required from the participants, so this would eliminate a number of participants in my work place automatically.  There is also a certain subset of employees that always answer surveys, and those who do not, so this behaviour creates a situation where the sample is not random, but I also do not know how you control for this as a researcher.  I don’t see any mention of potential confounding variables which I think needs to be considered.  There is some description of those in the sample, and it does speaks to the education level of the participants but not to classification  (ie. RN, MD, housekeeper, etc).  This would be of interest to me, so I see this as missing information.

Part C

4. Discuss your evaluation of the data analysis and results in the servant leadership article chosen. Include the quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 3.

I still really struggled to understand the information presented in Chapter 8 of Plano-Clark and Cresswell (2015) and have little confidence in my ratings for this section.  Even after reading and reviewing this information from this week I do not understand what analyses are supposed to be used when.  I have looked multiple times could not find a clearly identified alpha level in the Irving and Berndt (2017) study.  I think that there is supposed to be one, because there is hypothesis testing taking place and the testing is to determine relationships between variables, but I also cannot find a null hypothesis.  And I honestly do not understand from the reading where an alpha level should be identified or not.  There are also many values listed in the Irving and Berndt (2017) study that are not identified in self-study reading from this week.

The results section of my chosen article is very robust, but I do not know if this means that this is a very high quality quantitative research article, or if this represents a lot of smoke and mirrors.  Again, I think that I potentially have a very narrow, optimistic and naïve view of the world:  I would expect that any researcher is going to be aware that other researchers will be reviewing their work and would not attempt to publish something that would not undergo peer scrutiny.  But this may not be representative of reality.

Part D – Discussion Questions

As a consumer of research reports, I have, to date, skimmed over the methods and results section of research reports.  If I am going to be honest, at this juncture I am likely still going to skim over the data analysis section.  Even after the assigned reading and self-study I don’t think that I have enough applied knowledge to know what this section is telling me, and I certainly will not be able to use this section to determine if this is a high quality quantitative research report.  I do think that I can review the methods, participants, and data collection sections more critically.  For example:  how are the participants assigned and will the results produced from this assignment be applicable to my work?  How was the data collected?  What instruments were used, and would that instrument be valuable to me as a leader/clinician if it is available to me as a leader clinician?  What was the sampling strategy and why, and how was it determined to be large enough for generalizability?  I would now identify these as some questions that would be the most important aspects for me to consider.

I definitely find the data analysis section the most confusing but I think this is because I simply have no practical experience with it.  I was going to make the comment that if I ever get caught up in LDRS 591 I would go back and spend more time in that chapter, but I don’t actually think it would help because it still won’t be applied knowledge.

As I stated in my last blog I do think that being a knowledgeable consumer of the research literature is critical in health care and will be the way of the future.  Patients and professionals alike expect evidence based best practice in medicine and, if they don’t already, they should expect evidence based best practice in their leaders.  The only way to get there is to have leaders who are committed to know what that practice is.

My question for this week is unrelated to the topic we studied.  We are learning about servant leadership and studying the qualitative and quantitative evidence related to the model, behaviours, results, etc.  What leadership models (or if a specific model cannot be identified what leadership behaviours or actions) are promoted or used in your work place?  Are they evidence based, or are they based on traditional leadership styles?  Are leadership strategies in your workplace effective (objective or subjective answers invited), or no longer producing results?

I look forward to the discussion.

References

Plano-Clark, V. & Cresswell, J. (2015). Understanding research: A consumer’s guide (2^nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Irving, J. & Berndt, J. (2017). Leader purposefulness within servant leadership: Examining the effect of servant leadership, leader follower-focus, leader goal-orientation, and leader purposefulness in a large U.S. healthcare organization.  Administrative Sciences, 7(10), 1-20.

This is a blog.  So, I am hoping that my fellow students will permit me the freedom to treat it like a blog.

The fight was fought and lost in the battlefield of the mind this week.  I can’t help but think that I made a costly mistake choosing to go back to school while working full time.

I found the volume of reading overwhelming this week – to be honest, I didn’t end up finishing all of the articles.  I did read the assigned chapters.  But I would complete them, think I understood the concepts, attempt the practice exercises and be forced to admit I find this even more difficult than I did during my BSc degrees.  In addition, I did not clearly understand the assignment – but because I didn’t complete the reading until yesterday, and posts are to be up… well… yesterday, there was no time to ask clarifying questions.  After mentally agonizing for far longer than I care to admit I came to the conclusion that if I completed the assignment as I understood it, it was not possible to keep it to 500 words.  My faith is just not that big.

I share all of this because this is not my best work… AND it’s late.  My feelings about that vacillate between shame and resignation.  But, there is also an element of acceptance:  I gave what I was capable of this week.  That wee little feeling of acceptance signals some growth in me as a leader.  And that is an encouraging thought.

For the purposes of clarity I am going to use the headings as provided in the Unit 4 Assessment.

Part A

1. Comparr and contrast the elements of a qualitative research question and a quantitative research question.

The purpose statement in both quantitative and qualitative research will include these key features:  the focus, overall intent, the framework, the participants and the setting (Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015).

Quantitative research questions are narrow and specific.  The researcher wants to measure variables, and the research question will describe the response to a variable, question the relationship between variables, or compare responses to variables (Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015).  Quantitative research includes a theory, and a hypothesis or prediction of how variable are going to affect one another, and researchers set this focus prior to undertaking the research; it remains fixed (Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015).

In contrast, qualitative research questions are left broad, general and open-ended to seek a deeper understanding of a  central phenomenon; the focus is not set, and the research questions may change by the end of the study (Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015).  Qualitative research has a central question and subquestions to refine the study’s direction (Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015).

2. Discuss your evaluation of the statement of the problem in the servant leadership article focused on. Include the article reference, quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Since I come from a healthcare setting it comes as no surprise that the article I chose to evaluate was Principles of Servant-Leadership in Community Health Nursing:  Management Issues and Behaviours Discovered in Ethnographic Research by B. A. Sturm. (**I could not find in my search how to properly include an entire title and author as an in-text citation so I am hoping that this will be corrected for me so I can learn.  I would rather lose the marks now and be taught so I get it right in the future.)  Since the direction given to the students was to include the quality rating (0-3) with rationale/evidence, and these criteria are only applicable to the individual items in the scale, there did not appear to be any way to summarize this work.  This conclusion led to 2 hypotheses:

a) I didn’t understand the assignment, or;

b) my answer would have far more content than what could possibly be limited to 500 words.

Since I really struggled with self-assessing whether I was using the tool correctly or not, I chose to include all of my ratings and rationale (summarized) in the hopes of receiving some constructive feedback, and in the hopes of possibly comparing my answers with another student if they happened to choose the same article.

I also chose to practice creating a table in APA format, something I learned in LDRS 671, and as I have only done this once, I had already forgotten most of the requirements.  This also seemed to be the most logical way to present the information.  However, I am doing this in Word right now (as I don’t ever want to be in a position where I lose my work typing right into WordPress^TM), so it remains to be seen if the table will actually copy over into the blog.  (Addendum:  it did, but with some formatting I didn’t want.)

Table 1

Evaluating the Statement of the Problem in Selected Servant-Leadership Article (Sturm, 2009).

Adapted from Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015, p. 93.  (**Again, I don’t know if this is a correct way of giving credit to the authors and hoping for some feedback/correction.)

Part B

3. Discuss your evaluation of the literature review in the servant leadership article focused on. Include the quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 2 below.

I could have discussed this in Part A, but I am choosing to address it here.  I am not confident that I completed any of the evaluation sections correctly.  First, my ratings, based on the definitions in Plano-Clark and Cresswell (2015) seem very low for an article in a peer reviewed journal.  Second, I am somewhat confused by the flow of the article I selected.  The literature review in the Background section of the Sturm, 2009 article is very limited in scope in comparison to articles we have been reading in our other LDRS classes.  However, the literature review defining ethnography under the Methods section is quite robust.  I had understood that the Methods section was providing an explanation of the conceptual framework used by the author and was not related to the purpose or the problem the research intended to address.  The ratings for the next section are based on this understanding.

Table 2

Evaluation of the Literature Review in Selected Servant-Leadership Article (Sturm, 2009)

Adapted from Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015, p. 144

Part C

4. Discuss your evaluation of the purpose statement or research question in the servant leadership article focused on. Include the quality rating (0-3) and the rationale/evidence for the rating in the response.

Please refer to Table 3 below. 

Table 3

Evaluating the Purpose in Selected Servant-Leadership Article (Sturm, 2009)

Adapted from Plano-Clark & Cresswell, 2015, p. 186

Part D – Discussion Questions

As a consumer of research reports, the most important aspect of the introduction is understanding the problem being addressed by the research and the purpose of the research so that I know if this article is going to be relevant to my practice or not.  Now that I have been introduced to the evaluation tools, I am interested in learning how to use them to be able to tell if what I am reading is a high quality report or not.  I most certainly do not feel like I have this understanding at this point, but I am hopeful that with practice and some coaching I may be able to utilize the tools effectively in the future.

I do understand what elements belong in the introduction section.  I think I have a preliminary understanding of the indicators to look for in each of the elements, and how to apply the rating scales provided in Plano-Clark and Cresswell (2015) to evaluate the quality.  However, I would certainly not volunteer to be on a peer review panel, nor would I want to attempt to write a research article based on this limited knowledge.  I don’t actually know what questions to pose because of a self-awareness that I don’t even know what I don’t know.

As stated earlier, at least I know what to look for in a research report introduction.  Prior to this week, I didn’t know what elements were supposed to be in the introduction.  I do read clinical and leadership research reports in my workplace, but I have always just assumed that they were high quality.  That may be a valid assumption, and it may not be.  This knowledge will help me to begin to look for the indicators.  I know that there is a lot more to come as we work through all of the sections of a research report in LDRS 591.

My closing question is more practical and likely not going to generate much in the way of substantive responses from my fellow students, for which I apologize.  I would like to get an understanding of how my fellow students read and follow qualitative research reports.  I am from a clinical background – the vast majority of research I was exposed to in both of my baccalaureate degrees was quantitative.  I found some of the qualitative articles assigned in both LDRS 500 and LDRS 671 sent my head spinning.  Between trying to keep track of all the acronyms and the multiple hypotheses that kept coming up in the articles I had difficulties following the direction and understanding what I was reading.  Do you have a mental method, or another method of following all of the concepts and hypotheses being introduced?

References

Plano-Clark, V. & Cresswell, J. (2015). Understanding research: A consumer’s guide (2^nd ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.

Sturm, B. E. (2009). Principles of servant leadership in community health nursing.  Management issues  and behaviours discovered in ethnographic

research.  Home Health Care Management and Practice, 21(2), 82-89.

Prior to beginning my Masters in May 2018 I had no experience with APA. When I completed my Biology and Physical Therapy Bachelor’s degrees 27 and 23 years ago respectively I was very familiar with writing lab reports, which is a form of scholarly writing. I cannot actually recall what style we were required to use for citations and references then.

I have taken two MA courses so far, and right now I am so thankful for Professor Hyne-Ju Huizenga. Every week over the course of the 10 weeks of LDRS 617 she would provide invaluable feedback to my compendium submissions. It was rare that she recommended changes to the compendium content, but I learned so much from her regarding the use of APA style. I was surprised this week when I realized how much confidence I have gained from her patient, methodical teaching. My older daughters introduced me to the Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab, and that was another resource that I was referring to almost every week.

As discussed previously, I am a health care leader and evidence based medicine is now the norm, not the exception. Though I am not involved in clinical research, I do have employees and colleagues who are, and we have many Masters of Physical Therapy students doing preceptorships in our department involved in clinical research. Being able to access and then apply current evidence in the clinical setting is the only way to best practice in medicine. So understanding scholarly writing at a clinical level is important.

Scholarly writing is also important because there is a dire need for evidence based practice in health care management. Evidence is weaker, and there are challenges to sorting through valid, reliable, and applicable sources (Pfeffer & Sutton, 2006). Many managers retain old adages and myths and default to traditional styles of leadership when these behaviours and actions are no longer producing the intended outcomes; evidence supports this observation (Wakeman, 2013). The culture in Saskatchewan Health has changed, and using data and informal study is how decisions are made. With the transition to one provincial health authority in Dec 2017 there is a tremendous opportunity to introduce formal scholarly writing to drive evidence based decision making in management.

Elements of APA I continue to struggle with are citing and referencing the resources that are different from the norm. Books and journal articles are straight-forward; websites, online news, personal communication, videos, etc are less familiar to me. I have struggled with formatting issues in the reference list when using lecture notes or some other source that includes a URL that is incredibly lengthy. I also struggle with how and where to include quotes in the sentence structure so it flows. But my biggest struggle is going to be my writing style. I think I have gone over the recommended word count for all my blog posts and compendiums in the last 2 courses. I am not confident in my ability to articulate my thoughts in the clear, direct, and concise method as outlined in the learning activities this week. My action plan to improve on these elements are to refer to the Purdue OWL Online Writing Lab on informal sources, re-read the APA manual (2010) links on writing style, and practice being more concise in all of my writing (including emails, reports, personal correspondence).

Some questions that I have are: how often are informal sources cited in scholarly writing? If not often, is information on citing and referencing these sources something that can just be “looked up” on the rare occasions when it happens? How does a writer identify that they are too wordy, or too concise? (Follow up question: or is this the role of an editor?). I was instructed that the reference list for my last paper was also to be double spaced, but I note that references for the courses are not double spaced, nor were they in the quizzes – is this just because these references are not part of a formal submission? Is it appropriate and necessary to use references on blog posts? Should authors be using references on blog posts, or should this style of writing deliberately be more informal? Or does it depend on the audience?

I look forward to the responses.

References

Pfeffer, J.& Sutton, R. I. (2006). Evidence-based management. Harvard          Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2006/01/evidence-based-management

Wakeman, C. (2013). Close the door on what you think you know about leadership. Information Management Journal, 47(2), 28-32.

(P.S.  In light of this week’s topic… I know that this is not how references are supposed to be formatted, but I cannot figure out how to get a hanging indent on this page.  Even though I copied and pasted from my Word document, it will not copy over the hanging indent, and I cannot figure out how format it on here.  I also don’t understand why “bold” and “italics” will not paste over – WordPress take note.  Improvement idea!)