Quantitative research allows scientists to estimate and evaluate numerical results in an investigation. For example, the cross-sectional study by Abudu et al. (2020) studies the association between the patient’s health insurance and the diagnosed stage of melanoma. Indeed, melanoma is one of the most prevalent cancers in the U.S. (Abudu et al., 2020). Therefore, this essay aims to analyze the quantitative study’s scientific methods, hypotheses, sample population, and variables and determine possible errors.
The scientific method steps are easy to follow in this paper, starting with defining the research question, measures, and sample population criteria and ending with the statistical analysis. In this manuscript, the authors believed that there is an association between health insurance plans and the cancer stage. The chosen sample population was patients aged 26 to 64 who were diagnosed with an invasive melanoma of grade I, II, III, or IV (Abudu et al., 2020). The final sample size used for the evaluation was 177,247 people with this disease (Abudu et al., 2020). In this study, the variables that belong to the ratio measurement scale were health insurance, the pathohistological stage of melanoma, and demographic information. The latter was included to control for confounding factors in the multivariate analysis.
In conclusion, the evaluated paper was a quantitative case-control study about the association between patients’ insurance and the stage of melanoma. Although the results were statistically significant, two design errors were made in this study. Specifically, the authors did not consider that some insurance plans are limited and may not cover dermatological visits. Furthermore, some early and late-stage patients may be missing in the database; therefore, the true number of patients may be underestimated.
Reference
Abudu, B., Cook, K. A., Gershenwald, J. E., Cohen, P. R., & Geller, A. C. (2020). Quantitative associations between health insurance and stage of melanoma at diagnosis among nonelderly adults in the United States. Cancer, 126(4), 775-781.