Shwikar Othman
I’m Shwikar Othman a PhD candidate final year, with more than ten years of teaching and research experience. I started working as a Clinical Demonstrator, predominantly in midwifery education since 2010 and after my Master's degree continued to work as an Assistant Lecturer (equivalent to level A Lecturer) at the same university.
I have always enjoyed studying and conducting research, which inspired me to pursue my PhD. I undertook a research project at the University of South Australia titled 'Healthy eating education program for midwives to investigate and explore their knowledge and level of confidence to support pregnant women to eat healthily: A mixed methods study', Completed and waiting for Conferral.
Areas of interest :
• Maternity education and care
• Healthy eating education during pregnancy
• Nutrition education
• Quantitative research
• Qualitative research
• Mixed methods study
• Systematic review
Session
Background: Integration of mixed methods involves bringing together and merging quantitative and qualitative approaches. Limited application of data integration in midwifery research has highlighted a need to provide practical examples. The integration can occur at design, methods and at the interpretation and reporting levels.
Aim: To provide an example and describe how integration of data in a mixed methods study was used to develop a better understanding of midwives’ knowledge and confidence after attendance at a healthy eating education workshop/webinar and a follow-up interview.
Methods: A sequential explanatory mixed methods study investigated midwives’ level of knowledge and confidence prior to, and after attendance at a healthy eating education workshop/webinar. which was followed up by an exploration of midwives’ views and experiences This example illustrates how data integration can be achieved and emphasises specifically how a weaving technique can be used, and results are presented in a joint display (matrix) and extreme case analysis.
Findings: The sequential explanatory design was adopted to mix and merge different datasets to be analysed. Meta-inferences were used to identify areas of convergence and discordance, which provided a more comprehensive picture and understanding of the key themes that linked midwives’ knowledge and confidence.
Conclusion: Data analyses utilised different techniques for the integration of mixed methods data, i.e. weaving, and meta inferences in this midwifery research study. The application of this mixed methods design assisted in investigating midwives’ knowledge and confidence levels and provided clear insights for midwives needs and the effectiveness of healthy eating education.