For additional resources, use our general nursing guide for nursing databases or our tests and measures guide which contains many more resources for locating instruments than this course guide.

Assignment - Instrument Evaluation Paper

Goal of this research session: To help you identify 2 research instruments/tools that could be used to measure a variable in your research question.

Start with your research question, specifically your PICO(T) question

What is the variable you are trying to measure?

Remember: instruments are used for something which cannot be counted, so, for one example, the effectiveness of an education program.

The search field for instrument is called something different in these three databases:

CINAHL - instrument

HaPI - measure

PsycTESTS - construct

If you find or have already found a relevant research study, look at which instrumentation they used. You can then open the PDF of the article and read about which measures were used and their perceived efficacy.

When you find an instrument you wish to use in HaPI, scroll all the way to the bottom of the abstract page. You will see a box that shows you the secondary source, which is a source which uses the tool. The primary source is the citation of the tool itself.