what is the best method to assess the knowledge of the health care professional regarding acetaminophen ,open or closed ended questions ?
There are several ways you can get this information. For example, you could design a questionnaire that provides a list of statements about the medication, and the responder can simply respond true/false to each statement.
Or you can make the survey more complicated by using ordinal responses and ask the responder to respond to each question by "how much do you agree with the following statement: ...."
Or you can ask open ended questions, but that would require a lot more work on your end to decipher the responses and determine whether the response elicited the correct answer...
Correct Ariel. Iftikhar - at the end of the day which type of questions you want to use will depend entirely on what you want to find out.Closed questions will generally lead to using quantitative methodology and open questions often to a qualitative narrative methodology. There is then mixed method approaches whereby you could use both. Because your topic relates to a pharmacological intervention - then this would usually tend to lend itself more to a closed question approach to investigate effectiveness - unless you wanted to know about patients experiences of the intervention - then that would be more open
I definitely agree with the prior posts. I'm always thinking about how to get the most from the questionnaire tool, but also how to balance depth of responses with efficiency for data analysis (although there is software available to analyze qualitative data). This usually leads me to use a mixed methods approach as Dean mentioned. You want to make sure that you know what question you are trying to answer, what analysis you will need to get you there, and ensure that you will have the right type of data measurement.
I typically use closed end questions for the analysis, and include open ended responses as supplementary descriptive statistics to show a broader picture of the results. Also, with open ended questions you would want to be careful in your wording and interpretation. For example, if a health care professional doesn't mention some phrase/keyword in their answer, does that mean they do not have knowledge of that area or maybe that their answer just happened to not include it or focused on other information.
I would recommend checking what measurements already exist to assess knowledge of acetaminophen (or similar medication). I like the idea of using statements about the medication, and having the physicians respond on a Likert-type scale as Ariel mentioned. You might even consider the differences between knowledge, beliefs, and practice regarding acetaminophen. Definitely check out the literature to see how other researchers have measured similar constructs.
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