The essay is a critique of the article titled “Breast cancer survivorship: Are African American women considered? A concept analysis” written by Farmer and Smith, published back in 2002. The article talks about the issue of cancer survivorship. The main purpose of the work was to use evolutionary view concept analysis to cancer survivorship with a major concern on breast cancer and African American women population (Farmer & Smith, 2002).
The research design used was qualitative, concept analysis. The data were collected from fifty references, from the medicine and nursing sector. The finding of the analysis is that the issue of cancer survivorship is exclusive, developing, and at the same time it depends on what individuals perceive to be cancer diagnosis as well as personal experiences regarding living with cancer after being diagnosed (Farmer & Smith, 2002). In my view, I believe that the authors managed to give readers enough background of the problem. Additionally, they went the extra mile in making sure that their work was well researched since the reader is able to understand what cancer survivorship is.
As purported by Burns & Grove, 2009 sampling is one important criterion in research whether the approach taken is qualitative or quantitative. The sole reason to do this is that it would not be rational to carry out a study by considering the entire population. This is because it would be very expensive in terms of money as well as time for one to arrive at a conclusion. The authors had access to six databases; Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature, Cancer Lit, MEDILINE, Health-STAR, Premedline and PsychInfo (Farmer & Smith, 2002). The use of search terms ‘cancer survivorship’ and ‘English’ were appropriate since it only generates references that are in English and deal with cancer. This resulted to 192 references. According to the authors, references qualified to be used in the study only if they used ‘cancer survivorship’ as a title. Thirty references were obtained from computer searches and eleven were obtained manually. However, the authors failed to explain how they ensured that references from the six databases were selected randomly or otherwise (Burns & Grove, 2009).
In my view, using 50 references from the field of nursing and medicine was appropriate and adequate. Considering the fact that nursing and medicine has over 50,000 references about cancer, justifies the need to have a size that can be managed by the authors. I also believe that the size is indeed adequate enough to allow one to carry out a content analysis. This is based on the fact that Rodgers, in his content analysis concept proposed that the limit of references to be used should be at least 30 in number or 20% of the total literature available on the topic of interest (Farmer & Smith, 2002). In this case, the percentage is 26.0% (50/192*100).
In my humble opinion, I believe that the setting in which the data was collected as appropriate. This is based on the fact that the authors tried not to exhibit any biasness while sampling the references to be used. However, since the decision to arrive at the 11 references manually is not well documented, the validity and reliability of such data might be questioned.
References
Burns, N., & Grove, S. (2009). The Practice of nursing research: Appraisal, synthesis and generation of evidence. Missouri, MO: Elsevier Saunders.
Farmer, B., & Smith, E. (2002). Breast cancer survivorship: Are African American women considered? A concept analysis. Oncology Nursing Forum, 29(5), 780-787.