Designing a quasi-experimental study example

Describe your intervention content, experimental design, evaluation indicators, and analysis methods. Do not copy from existing papers.

 

You plan to provide health education intervention for community-based older adults about physical activity and nutrition. Please design a quasi-experimental study with a controlling group.

 

Answer:

Quality of life (QoL) was positively associated with handgrip strength (HGS). Two factors known as promoting factor of HGS are physical activity and nutrition. This study will measure the effect of health education intervention via videos about physical activity and nutrition to improve HGS.

 

Intervention content: PUGS (Indonesian Guidelines on Balanced Nutrition and Physical Activity). Every week from week-1 until week-5, the two interventional groups will get the short video (5-10 minutes) explaining about physical activity and nutrition based on PUGS guideline. The control groups just do their activities as usual.

The videos are 5 different videos with similar educational contents, all of them are made by the Indonesian Ministry of Health. The videos are played on the screen with LCD projector connected to a laptop.

 

Experimental design: Non-randomized controlled study.

We will select randomly 2 of all active Posyandu Lansia (where elderly regularly (monthly) come to get basic physical examination and health education) in District A. As a control, we will select randomly 2 of all active Posyandu Lansia in District B.

Most of Posyandu Lansia is consisted of 20-30 elderly, aged 60 years or more.

District A and District B are in the same City, but with a distance at least 10 kilometers.

Posyandu Lansia is categorized based on the record of regular activities on the previous year. Posyandu Lansia with 10 regular activities per year or more is considered as the active one.

 

Evaluation indicator: handgrip strength (HGS) on the 6^th month compared to the 1^st month done for all the elderly in four groups.

We will only analyze the data for the elderly that have twice measurements of HGS.

Handgrip strength were obtained by standard dynamometry. Measurements were carried out with the respondents standing, elbow flexed at 90° and with the forearm in neutral position. Each respondent carried out two measurements and the mean value for both hands was used for further statistical analysis.

 

Analysis method:

We will compare the mean of HGS in 5^th week and 1^st week for each group using paired t test.

We will compare the mean differences of HGS in interventional and control group using independent t test.

We also will analyze the number of video exposure in the interventional groups to see if there is