Reviewer: Elena V Donoso Brown, PhD (Duquesne University)
Description: This book addresses key content necessary for students to understand how research evidence is combined with practitioners' experience and clients' preferences, leading to evidence-based practice. It presents clinical questions that practitioners may ask and their corresponding research designs. Therefore, the book covers quantitative and qualitative approaches, with a brief introduction to mixed methods. It is designed as a workbook that can be utilized across team-based learning, flipped classroom, and lecture-based course formats. The book also provides a structure for students to complete a critically appraised paper. This second edition is an update to the original version, which was published in 2016.
Purpose: The main goal of the book is to train occupational therapy practitioners who can locate, evaluate, and apply evidence to the clinical reasoning process, utilizing research evidence as a part of shared decision-making. While other texts focus on research in occupational therapy or rehabilitation, this book succeeds in creating an accessible entry point for students learning how to understand and integrate evidence into practice when considering a diverse range of questions, from understanding a population to selecting assessments for evaluation and designing interventions.
Audience: The book is clearly written for occupational therapy and occupational therapy assistant students and practitioners, owing to the direct and frequent use of occupational therapy-focused examples and evidence. While other health professionals can also utilize the text, the examples from other rehabilitation professions, while present, are less frequent. The author is a well-recognized clinician-scientist and educator with the skills to provide critical information on incorporating evidence into practice in a manner that supports student learning. She has published extensively on assessment and program development, giving her the necessary expertise in the content.
Features: The book begins with an overview of evidence-based practice and the key elements needed for its application by practitioners. It then transitions into the key first step of locating evidence and basic descriptions of research types and the questions they aim to answer. This leads to a discussion of statistics across three chapters, one on descriptive and two on inferential. A chapter on measurement and how to determine if a measure is reliable and valid closes out the section focusing on the basics needed to critique evidence. The following chapters circle back to how this information can be used in practice to select interventions and inform program development. The examples used span various physical and mental health diagnoses and explore applications in different practice settings. While the book's content is stronger and written in an approachable way for students, the organization could provide greater cohesion in the presentation of topics. For example, the presentation of measurement information after the chapters on statistics may not enable students to gain as strong an understanding before engaging with the concepts of how to use the measures to determine information about the sample or outcomes. Also, while the author notes that research ethics is beyond the scope of this text, more links to resources on research ethics would enable instructors to incorporate the book into their course more readily if desired. The novel features are a highlight, as they enable students to continually engage with the content. The Evidence in the Real World features show how research can be directly applied to support practice, increasing the topic's salience. The Exercises and From the Evidence boxes enable students to practice skills highlighted in each chapter using papers from the occupational therapy literature. These workbook-type features also highlight another appealing element of the text, which is the flexibility that it provides to instructors in the delivery of content using a team-based learning approach, flipped classroom, or standard lecture.
Assessment: This book is a valuable contribution to the occupational therapy profession, as it provides a clear, focused, and interactive guide to develop occupational therapy students' evidence-based practice skills. It will also serve as a valuable reference for clinicians. The flexibility of the book will enable instructors to utilize it in a way that best suits their students' needs and curricular structure. This book is different from other texts like Kielhofner's Research in Occupational Therapy: Methods of Inquiry for Enhancing Practice, 2nd Edition, Taylor (F.A. Davis Company, 2017), which introduces and explores the importance of evidence-based practice and topics like critical appraisal, but has a stronger emphasis on how to conduct research and apply research methods in practice. This updated edition is needed, as it includes new areas like statistics and how to critically appraise qualitative research. Furthermore, the book has added many features to support student learning, and instructors can also choose to utilize the step-by-step approach to completing a critically appraised paper for an assignment that can directly apply needed evidence-based practice skills.