8
Questions are in bold followed by answers.
1. The number of nursing students enrolled in a particular nursing program between the years of 2013 and 2020, respectively, were 563, 593, 606, 540, 563, 610, and 577. Determine the mean ( X ), median (MD), and mode of the number of the nursing students enrolled in this program. Show your calculations.
Answer: X 578.9. X (563 593 606 540 563 610 577) 7 4052 7 578.857 578.9. To determine the median value of the distribution, first arrange the numbers of the enrolled nursing students in increasing order: 540, 563, 563, 577, 593, 606, 610. Then identify the number that divides this distribution into two equal halves, which is MD 577. The calculation N 1 2 7 1 2 4th score, which is 577 in this distribution. The mode in the above distribution is 563 because it is the most frequently occurring score.
2. What is the mode for the variable inpatient complications in Table 2 of the Winkler et al. (2013) study? What percentage of the study participants had this complication?
Answer: The mode for the variable inpatient complications is acute myocardial infarction (AMI) post admission for patients admitted with unstable angina (UA), which had the largest frequency of n 21 or 8% of the study participants.
3. Identify the mean, median, and range for the electrocardiographic (ECG) recording time (hours) for the patients in the Winkler et al. (2013) study. Is the distribution of the data normal, positively skewed, or negatively skewed? Provide a rationale for your answer.
Answer: The distribution of the ECG recording time (hours) variable had a mean 21, a median 24, and a range of values from 2 to 25. The mean is smaller than the median, and the range indicated that 2 hours of recording time was an outlier, since most of the patients had 20 to 24 hours of ECG recording time. The distribution of the ECG recording time seems negatively skewed, but the data would require testing for normality that is presented in Exercise 26.
4. As reported in Table 1, what are the three most common cardiovascular medical history events in this study, and why is it clinically important to know the frequency of these events?
Answer: The three most common cardiovascular medical history events were (1) personal history of coronary artery disease (CAD), frequency or n 176 participants or 63% of the sample; (2) history of unstable angina, n 124 or 45% of the sample; and (3) previous acute myocardial infarction, n 114 or 41% of the sample. These results enable nurses and other healthcare professionals to know the essential events to ask about when taking a history of patients with suspected ACS.
Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. AG 8-1
EXERCISE
5. What are the mean and median lengths of stay (LOS) for the study participants?
Answer: For LOS, the X 5.37 days, and the MD 4 days.
6. Are the mean and median for LOS similar or different? What might this indicate about the distribution of the sample? Is the distribution normal, positively skewed, or negatively skewed? Provide a rationale for your answer.
Answer: The mean (5.37 days) and the median (4 days) are fairly different. The differences in these two measures of central tendency might indicate there are outliers in the data for LOS. The range for LOS 1 to 93 days, which indicates that the 93-day stay is an outlier. The unusually high scores in a distribution increase the value of the mean as with LOS in this study resulting in a positively skewed distribution of LOS (see Figure 8-2). However, it would be important to review the actual data for outliers and calculate the normality of the LOS distribution during data analysis (see Exercise 26; Gray, Grove & Sutherland, 2017; Kim & Mallory, 2017).
7. Examine the study results and determine the mode for arrhythmias experienced by the participants. What was the second most common arrhythmia in this sample?
Answer: The 50 premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) per hour is the mode or most frequently occurring arrhythmia for this sample with 22% of the participants experiencing this event. Nonsustained ventricular tachycardia (VT) was the second most common arrhythmia with 15% of the participants experiencing VT.
8. Was the most common arrhythmia in Question 7 related to LOS? Was this result statistically significant? Provide a rationale for your answer.
Answer: Yes, the frequency of PVCs was independently predictive of LOS ( p 0.0001) as indicated in the narrative of the results. This result was statistically significant because most nursing studies set the level of significance at 0.05. Because the p value was less than 0.05, the result is statistically significant (Grove & Gray, 2019).
9. What study variables were independently predictive of the 50 premature ventricular contractions (PVCs) per hour in this study?
Answer: Age older than 65 years and final diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) independently predicted more than 50 PVCs per hours ( p 0.0004).
10. In Table 1, what race is the mode for this sample? Should these study findings be generalized to American Indians with ACS? Provide a rationale for your answer.
Answers: White is the mode for race in this sample with a frequency or n 143, which was 51% of the sample. Answers may vary, but the findings should not be generalized to American Indians with ACS because the sample was only 8% American Indians, or 23 participants. This number of subjects is very small and inadequate for fully understanding the arrhythmias in the first 24 hours of hospitalization for this ethnic group (Aberson, 2019).
Copyright © 2020, Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
AG 8-2 Answer Guidelines for Questions to Be Graded
Solution Manual for Statistics for Nursing Research A Workbook for Evidence-Based Practice, 3rd Edition, Visit TestBankBell.com to get complete for all chapters
