Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
into one Word document, which clearly identified which rank the
responses corresponded to. The final document was a fourteen page
file, which was then photocopied for each student in the cohort. This
activity, of collating, typing and eventually photocopying all student
responses occurred during the lunch-break of the evaluation day.
Students reassembled in lecture theatre and were given a copy of
the final document. Working independently, students were asked to
choose their top five most important responses from each set of
responses. So, for all of the responses within response 1, they were
asked to identify the five most important features and rank from 1
to 5, with 1 being the most important, and 5 being the least
important. The final documents were collected for analysis. These
data were analysed from a qualitative perspective, using content
analysis and quantitatively by ranking. The results of quantitative
analysis are presented below.
Findings
Quantitative data
From the first phase, within small groups, the following numbers of
responses were obtained for each category:
Rank 1 responses 46
Rank 2 responses 129
Rank 3 responses 144
Rank 4 responses 138
Rank 5 responses 56
From the second phase, where all students re-grouped in the
lecture theatre, 129 response sheets were completed. There are
some anomalies in the quantitative data: the number of responses
in each category which is not uniform, and the number of students
who participated in the morning session is greater than the number
that completed the final NGT document. The former is because the
typing of the first-phase responses from Post-It notes was
undertaken by different members of staff, some of whom merged
responses thematically, while some did not; the letter is because
there was some attrition between the morning and afternoon
sessions.
Although there was a large spread of responses within each
category, the top ten ranked items (within each category) have
been selected for presentation here.
Rank 1 responses (n = 46)
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