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Evaluating evidence is an important tool to have when researching topics of interest. Two types of research methods are qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative research is based more on words and perceptions of people and explains the “why”, “what” and “how” of research (McCusker & Gunaydin 2015). Quantitative research is based on numbers and explaining the data from results collected about research topics.
Evidence can be collected from a group to be used as a case-control study or evidence can be conducted with the highest quality from systematic reviews. Systematic reviews are the “utilisation of strict methodological guidelines for the literature search, study screening (as well as critical appraisal of eligible studies matching pre-defined criteria), data extraction, and coding” (Bertolaccini & Spaggiari, 2020). These reviews are considered to be the most reliable resource for evaluating evidence. These reviews also have a clear set of objectives and assess the validity of each piece of evidence. Systematic reviews look at the assessment of a topic as well as an evaluation of nursing issues. Case-control studies are used to compare and contrast groups and they “are used to study incidence, causes, and prognosis” (Mann, n.d). These types of studies can be used to determine disease and the importance of different variables of a group. A weakness in case-control studies is the chance of bias from sampling methods; therefore one of the sampling methods needs to be used. The main purpose is to determine an outcome from a problem. Both methods can be used to evaluate evidence depending on the topic or issue that is being studied. Systematic reviews have a low chance of bias whereas case control studies have a higher chance.