Potential participants will be excluded if they meet any of the following criteria: unable to give informed consent (poor physical and/or cognitive state), insufficient command of English to comprehend the consent process and/or data collection questions.
The interviewer training covered general interviewing guidelines, handling sensitive issues, confidentiality, data collection protocols, question-by-question reviews of both English and Spanish versions of the interview guide, role playing, and record-keeping.
As part of routine data collection this question is asked of patients at discharge or no more than 48 h afterwards.
Six categories, each consisting of a series of questions, are used to rate each study: (1) selection bias (two questions); (2) study design (four questions); (3) confounders (two questions); (4) blinding (two questions); (5) data collection methods (two questions) and (6) withdrawals and drop-outs (two questions).
Differences in data collection have questioned the validity of meta-analyses (Hawkes and Macgregor, 2009).
In subsequent rounds of BSC data collection, such questions were self-administered to mitigate any associated reporting bias.
Due to the nature of the data collection process, questions on the paper version were not compulsory and changes could be made at any time during the completion of the overall questionnaire.
A pre-tested instrument was used for the data collection, including questions on gender, age in years, years of work as an OHT, years since graduation as an OHT, formal schooling, individual income in a month, and participation in continuing educational programmes.
To be classified as a research question, the following criteria are required: (i) answering the question requires a hands-on investigation and data collection; (ii) the question includes a specific measurable dependent variable, a specific manipulated independent variable, and the connection between them; and (iii) the answer to the question is unknown to the student.
This could partly be explained by the fact that the chemistry and physics departments each currently have or have had at least one education researcher, but there was no biology education researcher in the biology department at the time of the data collection, raising the question of who biology faculty assume is taking on this role in their department.
