Subject Guides: Graduate Nursing Resources: Finding a Research Instrument & Evaluating Data

Finding a Research Instrument

Finding a validated instrument on your potential topic is an important step for your Scholarly Project. Some instruments are published and only available for purchase. Others may be used for educational purposes at no charge (although you should still get permission from the author of the instrument to use it for your research). Below are some starting points for finding instruments that are available either as a stand alone option (APA PsycTests) or appended to a journal article in CINAHL, MEDLINE or APA PsycInfo. See below for how best to maximize your success when searching each database.

APA PsycTests
provides access to psychological tests, measures, scales, surveys, and other assessments as well as descriptive information about the test and its development and administration.
CINAHL Complete
There are several options to find research instruments, use Publication Type: "questionnaire/scale" to find articles that include the full instrument; use "Instrumentation" under Select a Field to search articles that use a known instrument; or try searching with this string of words along with your topic to find likely instruments: test* OR measure* OR survey* OR questionnaire* OR scale* OR batter* OR inventor* OR checklist* OR instrument* OR pretest* OR posttest* OR interview*
MEDLINE
MEDLINE does not have any special field or publication type for finding instruments, but you can still used these terms along with your search to find likely articles: test* OR measure* OR survey* OR questionnaire* OR scale* OR batter* OR inventor* OR checklist* OR instrument* OR pretest* OR posttest* OR interview*
APA PsycInfo
In APA PsycInfo use "Tests & Measures" under Select a Field to search articles that use a known instrument (you can search for the word "appended" in this field to find articles where the instrument is included as part of the article). Also, try searching with this string of words test* OR measure* OR survey* OR questionnaire* OR scale* OR batter* OR inventor* OR checklist* OR instrument* OR pretest* OR posttest* OR interview* along with your topic to find likely instruments.

Health Literacy Tool Shed
Online database of instruments to measure individuals' health literacy. Instruments are identified from the peer-reviewed literature

Evaluating Data

Statistics for Human Service Evaluation by Reginald O. York
Call Number: Online Title
ISBN: 1483386716
Publication Date: 2016
This book gives step-by-step methods for analyzing data using Excel in a variety of circumstances (for example, when you have pretest and posttest scores - a common DNP scholarly project situation).