Abstract
Surgical education offers a rich and exciting setting for conducting educational research. Surgical educators need to understand basic concepts in educational research in order to design and conduct research studies as well as to become critical consumers of journal articles that report educational research findings. This chapter is divided into two portions. The first offers an overview of foundational concepts involved in the design of educational research studies. To that end we describe the differences between quantitative and qualitative studies and for each of them address what we believe are the five key questions: (1) What is the main purpose of the research being conducted?; (2) How is the number of research subjects determined?; (3) What are the key methods for collecting data from research subjects?; (4) How are research data analyzed?; and (5) How are research data reported? The second half of the chapter discusses in detail two published articles, one that follows the quantitative design and one that uses the qualitative research design. For each article we discuss, in a practical manner, how the five key elements apply.
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Further Reading
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© 2013 Springer-Verlag London
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Kim, S., Jabori, S., Pellegrini, C.A. (2013). Promoting Excellence in Surgical Educational Research. In: Pugh, C., Sippel, R. (eds) Success in Academic Surgery: Developing a Career in Surgical Education. Success in Academic Surgery. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4691-9_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4691-9_13
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