NURS9903 moves the approved dissertation proposal into active execution — the phase where careful planning meets the practical challenges of recruiting participants, managing IRB requirements, and handling real, sometimes messy data.
IRB compliance and data collection execution
NURS9903 requires students to actively manage IRB compliance throughout data collection — ensuring informed consent processes are properly followed, data is stored securely according to the approved protocol, and any necessary IRB amendments (for protocol changes discovered necessary during actual data collection) are properly submitted and approved before implementation.
Managing recruitment challenges and beginning analysis
The course addresses the practical realities of participant recruitment — which frequently proceeds more slowly or differently than planned — and requires documenting recruitment strategy adjustments made in response. Students begin preliminary data analysis as data accumulates, an iterative process (especially in qualitative research) that often shapes ongoing data collection decisions.
Key topics in NURS9903
- Managing ongoing IRB compliance: informed consent, data security, protocol amendments
- Executing the approved research methodology in real-world data collection
- Adapting recruitment strategy in response to slower-than-planned enrollment
- Documenting and justifying any necessary changes to the approved data collection protocol
- Beginning preliminary data analysis as data accumulates
- Maintaining a detailed research log throughout the data collection phase
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Worked example: navigating a recruitment challenge
- Original plan: Recruit 15 participants within 6 weeks through a single hospital's nursing staff email list
- Challenge: Only 4 participants enrolled after 4 weeks
- Response: Student submits an IRB amendment to expand recruitment to a second, similar hospital system and adds a small gift card incentive, both changes properly approved before implementation
- Outcome: Target sample size reached within an additional 3 weeks
- Documentation: The research log documents the original approach, why it fell short, the approved amendment, and the final recruitment outcome — providing a transparent record for the eventual dissertation methodology chapter
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Frequently asked questions
Any change to an approved research protocol — including changes to recruitment strategy, such as expanding to new recruitment sites, adding participant incentives, or modifying eligibility criteria — must go through formal IRB review and approval before being implemented, because the IRB's original approval was specifically based on the protocol as submitted, and unapproved changes could introduce new risks or ethical considerations the IRB never had the opportunity to evaluate. NURS9903 teaches that treating recruitment strategy adjustments as informal, minor tweaks not requiring IRB notification is a serious compliance violation, even when the adjustment seems intuitively harmless (like adding a small incentive) — proper research conduct requires submitting and receiving approval for the amendment before implementing the change, not simply implementing it and documenting it after the fact.
In many qualitative research traditions, data collection and data analysis are iterative and interconnected processes rather than fully sequential ones — as a researcher analyzes early interviews, emerging patterns or unexpected themes often inform adjustments to later interview questions, helping the researcher probe more deeply into promising areas or clarify ambiguous findings from earlier data. This iterative approach also helps researchers assess when they've reached data saturation (the point at which additional data collection is no longer yielding meaningfully new information), which is often the basis for determining when data collection is actually complete in qualitative research, rather than working from a fixed predetermined sample size decided entirely in advance. NURS9903 teaches students conducting qualitative dissertations to expect and plan for this iterative overlap between collection and analysis, which is quite different from typical quantitative research, where data collection is usually fully completed using a fixed protocol before formal analysis begins.