Research Methods and Data Collection

A questionnaire was distributed to a variety of physicians around the United States to

assess how they typically care for POTS when it is presented in pediatric patients and to gauge
their opinions on how these patients most effectively treated. The questionnaire was structured so
that it could elicit both quantitative and qualitative results. Some of the questions were multiple
choice or in the form of a Likert scale, and the answers to these questions could be objectively
quantified, while other questions were open-ended, allowing the researcher to gather more
detailed, expanded results on how the respondents choose to treat pediatric POTS.
If the researcher were to change anything about the questionnaire that was distributed, it
would be to attempt to distribute it to a greater number of physicians. This was one limitation of
the study, but not unusual when trying to recruit participants from a large geographical area.
Having more data would possibly allow the researcher to draw more detailed conclusions. After
analyzing the data, the researcher also would have liked to have some additional open-ended
questions in the questionnaire, as these types of questions served to prompt the participants to
provide more specific details about how they treat pediatric POTS.
In addition to distributing a questionnaire in order to acquire data on this topic, the
researcher also utilized meta-analysis in order to gather data for this research project. A variety of
different sources regarding treatment methods used to treat POTS were analyzed and
synthesized, ranging from academic journals articles to a shorter piece from the Johns Hopkins
Childrens Center website. Meta-analysis was utilized in order to gain an understanding of the
treatments being used to treat pediatric POTS according to the literature that is available on the
topic.

If the researcher were to change anything about the way in which data was collected for
this project via meta-analysis, it would be to have drawn information from a greater number of
sources. However, it would have been difficult for the researcher to have done this, as there is a
very limited library of literature pertaining to this specific topic.