Background: Caring in complex health care contexts requires academic and research education (1) to develop and use evidence for positive impact on patients’ outcomes. Reviews of nursing research highlight a slight improvement in intervention research (2–4), however, European nursing doctoral trends might prefigure the next generation of European research.
Methods: A descriptive analysis of 35 nursing doctoral research projects from the EANS summer school in 2018 in terms of: research methods, settings, domains and levels of outcomes.
Results: Nineteen of the 35 student projects were primary research and 16 mixed primary and secondary. Fourteen studies were experimental: 4 RCTs, 1 experiment without randomization, 9 experiments without control. Twenty-one projects were observational: 5 qualitative, 14 mixed/multi-methods, 2 quantitative. Twenty-seven projects from outpatient and secondary care hospital settings, 20 targeted individuals/family. Projects explored clinical domains as well as the nursing profession.
Discussion: Just one third of projects were experimental, compared to two thirds observational studies that will not deliver tested interventions. The number of RCTs is negligible, with just under 1/3rd uncontrolled experimental studies likely to suffer from significant biases, likely to overestimate the effect of interventions under test. Further development of intervention methods at PhD level in nursing is required.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)