Feasibility

Now that you have thought about topics that interest you and you’ve learned how to frame those topics as nursing research questions, you have probably come up with a few potential research questions—questions to which you are dying to know the answers. However, even if you have identified the most brilliant research question ever, you are still not ready to begin conducting research. First, you’ll need to devise a plan for your research design, which we will discuss later. Once you’ve settled on a research question, your next step is to think about the feasibility of your research question.

There are a few practical matters related to feasibility that all researchers should consider before beginning a research project. Are you interested in better understanding the experiences of flight nurses during emergency air evacuations? This is a fascinating topic, but unless you are already embedded in that specialized field, gaining access to participants and observing real-time situations may be difficult. Maybe you’re curious about the impact of culturally safe care practices on Indigenous communities in remote areas. However, building the trust and relationships required for that kind of research takes time, especially if you’re not already part of the community. Maybe your dream is to study the long-term effects of nurse burnout across multiple international health systems—but unless you have multilingual skills and significant funding, this would likely be beyond the scope of a student research project. While nursing research offers a wide range of meaningful and important topics, researchers must realistically assess the feasibility of their ideas based on access, time, funding, and ethical considerations

Importance of research projects

Another consideration before beginning a research project is whether the question is important enough. Answering the question should be important enough for the researcher to invest the effort, time, and money often required to complete a research project. As we discussed previously, you should choose a topic that is both important to you and interesting enough that could enjoy learning about it for at least a few months. Your time and effort are your most precious resources, particularly when you are in school. Make sure you dedicate them to topics and projects you consider important.

Your research question should also be important and relevant to the scientific literature in your topic area. Scientific relevance can be a challenging concept to assess. For example: If your research aims to test the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) in treating depression, then you are a little late to be asking that question, as hundreds of scientists have already published articles on this topic. If CBT interests you, perhaps you can apply it to a population for which it has not yet been proven effective, like older adults. Or, you could apply it to a social problem for which it has not yet been tested, like mobile phone addiction. Your project should have something new to say that we don’t already know. For a good reason, Google Scholar’s motto at the bottom of their search page is “stand on the shoulders of giants.” Nursing research rests on the work of previous scholars, and we learn more about the nursing world by building off their findings. Ensure that your question will bring our scientific understanding of your topic to new heights.

Finally, your research question should be important to the nursing world and the public. Nurses conduct research on behalf of target populations. Your research should matter to the people you are trying to help. By helping this client population, your study should be important to society as a whole.

Remixed from:

• Scientific Inquiry in Social Work by Matthew DeCarlo (2018) published by pressbooks under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
  • Chapter 8: Creating and Refining a Research Question

Media Attributions

• Dr. Fehr [avatar] by Research Assistant Katie Gregson on Canva using Canva AI image creation https://www.canva.com/ai-assistant/ is subject to the Canva Pro Content License.

References

DeCarlo, M. (2018). Chapter 8: “Creating and refining your question”. In Scientific Inquiry in Social Work. Pressbooks. https://pressbooks.pub/scientificinquiryinsocialwork/chapter/8-0-chapter-introduction/