In the paper by Twycross (2003), the researcher was looking at how children describe their experiences with postsurgical pain in order to identify what they thought could be done to improve the quality of pain relief they had received following surgery (12). Despite clinical guidelines for the relief of post-operative pain in children, children continue to experience moderate to severe pain, which is not relieved while they are in the hospital.
The independent variable in the study was the opinions of 52 different children aged between 8 and 12 years of age who were undergoing surgery under anesthesia and who had the cognitive ability to respond to the questions of the interviewer. The questions asked in the study concerned the children's initiation of self-administered pain-relieving methods, the pain relieving methods used by nurses and parents of the children, and the children's suggestions to their nurses and parents in relation to managing their postoperative pain. The dependent variable was the method of pain relief used by the children.
The study on infant pain by Reyes (2003) looked at how nurses perceived their assessment of infant pain, and how this pain assessment was actually assessed in an intensive care unit (291). The purpose of the study was to evaluate the beliefs of nurses about infant pain assessment, and to compare these beliefs to their actual practice of infant pain assessment as they recorded it in the infants' charts. It compared how nurses in an intensive care unit perceived infant pain with how they actually documented this pain to answer the questions: (1) What do nurses self-report regarding their assessment and understanding of infant pain? (2) What do nurses document in the infants' charts regarding pain assessment? and (3) What is the congruency of the self-report to the documentation.
The independent variable in this study was the nurses' self-reports of infant pain assessment, and ...