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Quantitative Research Plan

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Quantitative Research Plan
Affordable Health Care: Is It Causing Stress with Hospital Administrators
Derrick Mike
Walden University
Research Theory
January 23, 2015

This abbreviated quantitative research plan includes an introduction, a purpose statement, viable research questions, a hypotheses and a research plan. This quantitative study focuses on whether and to what extent did the Affordable Care Act create more stress for hospital administrators.
Introduction
Stress has become pervasive in the lives of many individuals, and stress has been found to cause adverse actions in the physical, emotional or psychological aspects of a person’s life (Scott, 2015). Also stress has been found to profoundly affect mental health, physical well-being, productivity, performance, and decision making as well as exerts a tremendous burden on biological systems (Hildebrandt, Yehuda, & Olff, 2012). This study focuses on whether and to what extent did the Affordable Care Act created more stress for hospital administrators. To adequately determine the effects of the stressful factors, it is important to understand the experiences of these individuals in stressful situations. A formal survey design will be chosen to obtain a cross-section of the personal experiences of hospital administrators from varying types of hospitals, such as rural and/or metropolitan cities who are in possible stressful situations and whether and to what extent they were affected in more stressful manners as a result of the Affordable Care Act. Surveying a sample, of three, but no more than ten hospital administrators will provide the most accurate and subjective experiences of this population and how the Affordable Care Act may have created a more stressful working environment and/or experience for them concerning their job duties and expectations.
Purpose Statement
The purpose of this study is to determine whether and to what extent did the Affordable Care Act create more stress for hospital administrators. Since stress has become pervasive in the lives of many individuals, and has a tremendous effect on physiological health, determining the effects of stress and/or additional stress added as a result of the Affordable Health Care Acts to determine if it indeed created more stress on hospital administrators is pertinent. The survey will help generalize the experiences of hospital administrators from varying hospital settings, such as rural hospitals, verses hospital located in larger metropolitan cities. During the past four years, the Affordable Care Act was instituted, passed by Congress and then signed into law by the President on March 23, 2010. Then on June 28, 2012, the Supreme Court rendered a final decision to uphold the health care law (“Affordable care act,” 2014). From that point some changes have occurred in the health care industry as a whole. With these changes in health care and health care services, along with health care services cost, perhaps comes additional stress and the stress is idiosyncratic to those in administrative positions because they are not only dealing with the changes, but some are also dealing with families and the changes which come with that.
Viable Research Questions
How did the Affordable Health Care Act impact hospitals?
How did the Affordable Health Care Act impact hospital costs and allocations as whole?
Did the Affordable Care Act create changes of necessity with hospital care?
Did the impact of the Affordable Health Care Act create opportunities which were a cause of decline in hospitals?
How did the Affordable Health Care Act impact rural hospitals verses bigger city (metropolitan) hospitals?
The research questions can be answered by observing responses to the survey. The responses can be measured by utilizing a Likert-type scale and assigning numerical value to the scaled responses. The Likert-type of survey will give the basis for research answers and finality by making questionnaires which are not just any type of question. In fact, the format used will be followed in formulating the questions. The questions will ask for an agreement or disagreement in their response. Research will show implications which will either show that the Affordable Health Care Act caused additional and perhaps unneeded stress for hospital administrators and this research will add to the knowledge the extent to which this factor created other stress related problems for these individuals.
Hypothesis
Stress greater than or less than prior to the Affordable Care Act.
Increases or decreases in administrator turnovers caused by stress due to the Affordable Care Act.
Stress less or more for hospital administrators in varying areas.
These directional hypotheses are measureable by determining whether and to what results are seen as being related to possible additional stress being caused for hospital administrators surrounding the Affordable Health Care Act.
Research Plan
The purpose of this study is to determine the characteristics of a sample of hospital administrators, those who work for rural and/or larger cities (metropolitan areas) hospitals to determine the additional stress caused by the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The sample will consist of the administrator’s responses to a notice for participants sent to the administrators with a detailed measure in place for returning the information back. Depending on the number of responses, all, or a randomly selected number of participants will be selected. This population was chosen because of the assumed impact of stress for this type in relation to the Affordable health Care Act. The survey design is the preferred type of data collection procedure for this study and it will utilize a self-administrated questionnaire. The preference for survey design is guided by the need to obtain direct responses regarding the subjective experiences of the hospital administrators in stressful situations with regard to their work schedules, changes which occurred, both of which will be centered on the Affordable Health Care Act, and also their family settings as a means of gauging their personal lifestyles in respect to stress carried over from the job duties. The survey instrument used for this survey was designed for this research. The dependent variable in all five hypotheses is the additional source. The independent variables are interrelated with the positions these administrators hold and the duties they perform, such as other employees. The content areas of the survey are to identify to what extent participants identify and utilize if there is additional or a greater sense of stress felt or placed upon these individuals because of any measures within the Affordable Health Care Act as it related to their specific job duties and those they employ. Further, it will identify how they feel from the perspective of the Affordable Health Care Act adding or possibly relieving them of their stress. For data analysis and interpretation, the study will report and analyze the number of returned surveys as well as the number on non-returned surveys. Wave analysis will be utilized to determine if responses change from the beginning to the latter part of the return process (Creswell, 2009). Descriptive analysis will be provided for the independent and dependent variables in the study and will identify the means, standard deviations, and range of scores for these variables. An analysis of variance will be utilized to make comparisons between the independent variables.

References
Affordable care act. (2014, November 20). Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/tools/affordable-care-act Creswell, J. (2009). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Hildebrandt, T., Yehuda, R., & Olff, M. (2012). Effects of Traumatic Stress Molecular and Hormonal Mechanism. In , European Journal of Psychotraumatology (pp. 1-123). Co- Action Publishing.
Scott, E. (2015). stress and health stress: How it affects your body, and how you can stay healthier. Retrieved from http://stress.about.com/od/stresshealth/a/stresshealth.htm
The likert item. (2015). Retrieved from http://www.brighthubeducation.com/special-ed-law/13507-likert-scale-questionnaire-format-and-sample-questions/

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