In Liu, Zhang and Li’s article “Sleep Duration and Overweight/Obesity in Children: Review and Implications for Pediatric Nursing” (2012), the authors create a literature review to discuss the relationship between the duration of sleep and childhood obesity. Overall, the article itself is incredibly strong; the methodology is appropriate, and the findings of the research have interesting implications. Despite some weaknesses with validity and applicability of the research, the authors provide a solid contribution to the existing body of research on the topic of childhood obesity.
The article’s abstract strongly fulfills the purpose of the article; the first section (Purpose) lays out the researchers’ subject and thesis, its methodology and research design. The second section (Conclusions) provides the results, along with further statement of the sample size of the literature reviewed (“25 studies selected from PubMed and Web of Knowledge databases”) (Liu, Zhang and Li 2012, p. 193). The third section (Practice Implications) sums up the information into actionable implications for medical practice, thus positing a concrete idea for what to do with the information provided in the article. The abstract is succinct and well-organized, relaying just enough information without providing unnecessary data.
The research methodology of the article is a literature review; the researchers examined appropriate studies of existing literature by performing keyword searches for appropriate articles in two medical databases (PubMed and Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge). The qualification criteria for the existing literature involved “only articles pertaining to human subjects and published in the English language within the most recent 5-year span, 2006-2011,” thus ensuring the most relevant and current data (p. 194). The researchers are honest about their selection process, using title and abstract reviews to select among the remaining choices, then further breaking down the choices to include studies about children and childhood obesity; the studies themselves use a wide variety of methodologies and research designs. One weakness of this step is that they do not go into greater detail regarding how they extract the information from the articles, merely stating that “Data were then extracted and analyzed in a combined effort by the authors” (p. 194). However, this may be construed as a simple deep reading and analysis of the articles, given their comprehensive review in the following article.
The researchers themselves have impressive pedigrees, all of which lend themselves well to this particular subject. Liu is an Associate Professor at the School of Nursing and Medicine, Zhang is a School of Nursing Master’s candidate, and Li is a research associate in that same School of Nursing. While their interest in the field is definitely applicable to the subject of the article, it does preclude them from having a great deal of experience in medical research. This is perhaps one of the reasons the study itself is so qualitative and subjective in nature, and is based primarily upon existing research.
The findings of the research yield many different facets to the same conclusion: a relationship between childhood obesity and sleep duration can be found. The researchers even go into the history of finding methodologies to track this trend: discussion of longitudinal studies and their applicability in assessing sleep/obesity relationships provides greater context to the findings (p. 195). Biological factors such as obesity and gender can play into the relationship between sleep and weight, and environmental factors like television viewing habits, changing sleep schedules and parental attributes are also noted in their findings (p. 200). The data strongly supports the conclusions stated in the article, as well as their original thesis; where they vary primarily is in the specific factors surrounding this correlation, and the methods by which this phenomenon was measured.
The research study and its subsequent article have quite a few weaknesses, most notably the qualitative and scattered nature of the research. The wide variety of literature they found involves many different methodologies and samples, leading to a decidedly uneven body of literature to draw from. The authors find it difficult to discern a cohesive throughline in the research body as a whole, which stems from the variety in their sample articles. However, one of the strengths of the article itself is that the researchers are upfront about these limitations, and give detailed reasons for the inclusion of some of the less relevant samples (such as Beebe et al. (2007)) (p. 194). Their findings are well organized by category, the table noting the strengths and weaknesses of each study is comprehensive and detailed, and strong conclusions are reached reasonably through the trends found in the literature. Childhood obesity is a problem, and the research examined does actually show a relationship between it and sleep duration; this is the extent of their thesis, which is broad enough to be easily supported. In short, despite the shortcomings and relative lack of quantitative depth the article provides, it makes up for it in consistency and honesty in their methodology, and the quality of their qualitative assessments.
References
Liu J., Zhang A., & Li L. (2012). Sleep duration and overweight/obesity in children: Review and
implications for pediatric nursing. Journal for Specialists in Pediatric Nursing 17: 193-204.
