HLT-362V Article Analysis 1: Guide + 3-Article Worked Example

Updated on: Sep 14, 2026

If you pulled up the “Article Analysis 1” template for the first time and thought wait, this isn’t the table I was expecting, you’re not wrong to double-check it. The real GCU template asks for three articles, not two, and it uses eight specific fields (Broad Topic Area/Title, Variables and Type of Data, Population of Interest, Sample, Sampling Method, Descriptive Statistics, Inferential Statistics, plus the APA citation and permalink) rather than a generic “purpose, design, findings, limitations” write-up. Mixing those two formats up is one of the fastest ways to lose points on an assignment that otherwise just rewards careful reading.

This guide walks through the template exactly as GCU issues it, explains what actually belongs in each field, and works through a complete three-article example using real, current, peer-reviewed nursing research, so you can see what a filled-in row should look like before you sit down with your own three articles. HLT-362V’s current course description centers on understanding how statistical methods are applied and evaluated in published healthcare research, and Article Analysis 1 is where that shows up as a graded deliverable rather than a lecture topic.

Assignment requirements can vary by current course shell and instructor. Always check your own syllabus and rubric in the GCU classroom before submitting; this guide reflects the standard version of the assignment and template as issued in the HLT-362V course materials.

Article Analysis 1 Assignment Prompt

Assessment Description

The interpretation of research in health care is essential to decision making. By understanding research, health care providers can identify risk factors, trends, outcomes for treatment, health care costs and best practices. To be effective in evaluating and interpreting research, the reader must first understand how to interpret the findings. You will practice article analysis in Topics 2, 3, and 5.

For this assignment:

Search the GCU Library and find three different health care articles that use quantitative research. Do not use articles that appear in the topic Resources or textbook. Complete an article analysis for each using the “Article Analysis 1” template.

Refer to the “Patient Preference and Satisfaction in Hospital-at-Home and Usual Hospital Care for COPD Exacerbations: Results of a Randomised Controlled Trial,” in conjunction with the “Article Analysis Example 1,” for an example of an article analysis.

While APA style is not required for the body of this assignment, solid academic writing is expected, and documentation of sources should be presented using APA formatting guidelines, which can be found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.

This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. A link to the LopesWrite technical support articles is located in Class Resources if you need assistance.

HLT-362V Article Analysis 1 at a Glance

If you are working this into a single study block between shifts, the honest time cost is finding three articles that actually qualify. Filling in the template for an article you’ve already read closely takes ten minutes. Finding three articles that are quantitative, peer-reviewed, and not already sitting in your Topic Resources can eat forty-five minutes if you’re searching blind. The searching section below is built to cut that down.

For the full HLT-362V assignment sequence, see the HLT-362V Applied Statistics for Health Care guide. Article Analysis 2 uses this same template on a new set of articles later in the course; see the HLT-362V Article Analysis 2 guide when you get there.

Need a second set of eyes on your three articles or your filled-in template before you submit? Message Gradevia on WhatsApp at +1 564-544-6924 for a quick scope review.

What Is the HLT-362V Article Analysis 1 Assignment, Exactly?

You are asked to search the GCU Library and locate three different health care articles that use quantitative research, then complete an Article Analysis 1 template entry for each one. Articles already assigned as Topic Resources or pulled from your textbook do not qualify; the point of the assignment is finding and evaluating research on your own, not re-analyzing something you were handed.

GCU provides its own worked example to model the assignment on: an analysis of Patient Preference and Satisfaction in Hospital-at-Home and Usual Hospital Care for COPD Exacerbations: Results of a Randomised Controlled Trial (Utens et al., 2013), broken down in the official “Article Analysis Example 1” document. That example is worth opening once so you can see GCU’s own expectations for how much detail belongs in each cell, especially the descriptive- and inferential-statistics rows, which are the two fields students most often leave too vague.

APA formatting is not required for the body of the template itself. It is required for how you document your sources: your APA 7 citation, and a working permalink for anything you access through the GCU Library, need to be correct. You’ll submit the completed template through LopesWrite, GCU’s originality-checking tool, so the analysis needs to be written in your own words rather than lifted from the article’s abstract.

The Article Analysis 1 Template, Field by Field

The template has eight rows, repeated once per article column. Here’s what belongs in each one, and what graders are actually checking for.

1. Article Citation and Permalink (APA format)

A full APA 7 reference for the article, plus a working link. If you pulled the article through the GCU Library’s database interface, use the permalink the database gives you, not the address bar URL, which often expires once your session ends.

2. Broad Topic Area/Title

A one-line description of what the study is actually about, in your own words. Not the literal title copied and pasted; a plain-language summary of the topic area, such as “the relationship between hospital nurse staffing levels and patient mortality.”

3. Variables and Type of Data for the Variables

Identify the study’s independent variable(s) and dependent variable(s), and label what type of data each one is: categorical (nominal or ordinal) or continuous (interval or ratio). This is the field most often left half-finished. Naming the variable isn’t enough; you also need to say what kind of data it produces. “Treatment location” is categorical (home vs. hospital); “satisfaction” measured on a 1-5 scale is ordinal; “age in years” is continuous/ratio.

4. Population of Interest for the Study

The larger group the researchers want their findings to apply to, not the specific people who were surveyed. If a study says its findings should inform how hospitals staff medical-surgical units generally, the population of interest is something like “adult inpatients in acute-care hospital settings,” even though the researchers only collected data from a subset of hospitals.

5. Sample

The actual group of people (or records, or hospitals) the researchers collected data from: how many, and any defining characteristics stated in the methods section.

6. Sampling Method

How the sample was selected: convenience sampling, random sampling, stratified sampling, or a multi-site/multilevel design that clusters patients within hospitals or units. The methods section almost always states this directly, often in the first paragraph of “Methods.”

7. Descriptive Statistics (Mean, Median, Mode; Standard Deviation)

Pull at least one real, specific example of a descriptive statistic reported in the article: a mean age with its standard deviation, a percentage breakdown of the sample by sex, a median score. These usually live in the “Sample Characteristics” or “Table 1” section near the start of the Results, before the hypothesis tests begin. Descriptive statistics summarize the sample itself; they don’t test a relationship or produce a p-value.

8. Inferential Statistics

Pull at least one real, specific example of an inferential statistic: a p-value, a correlation coefficient, an odds ratio, a regression coefficient, or the result of a t-test, ANOVA, or chi-square test. Inferential statistics are what the researchers used to test whether an observed relationship is likely to be real, rather than just describing the sample. These show up later in Results, usually attached to the study’s actual research question.

How to Find Three Qualifying Articles Without Burning Your Whole Study Block

Search efficiently instead of scrolling endlessly through database results:

1. Start in the GCU Library, not open web search. Use CINAHL or a similar nursing/health database rather than Google Scholar first; GCU Library results are easier to confirm as legitimate scholarly sources and usually generate a clean permalink automatically.
2. Filter for “Peer Reviewed” and a recent date range (the last five years is a safe default) before you even type a search term. This removes most of the noise in one click.
3. Search your topic plus a method word. Adding “cross-sectional,” “randomized,” “survey,” or “quantitative” to your keyword search filters out qualitative and opinion pieces before you open a single article.
4. Check the abstract for a sample size and a statistical test by name. If the abstract doesn’t mention a number of participants and doesn’t name at least one statistical method (correlation, regression, t-test, chi-square, ANOVA), skip it. Qualitative studies describe themes and interview quotes instead.
5. Cross-check against your Topic Resources list before you commit to an article. This is the step students skip under time pressure, and it’s the one that gets analyses rejected. If a title looks familiar because you already saw it assigned in Topic 1 or 2 readings, it’s disqualified even if it’s a strong quantitative study.
6. Pull all three articles before you fill in a single template cell. Switching between “finding mode” and “analyzing mode” repeatedly costs more time than doing all your searching first, then all your reading and filling second.

How to Tell Population from Sample (and Why Graders Check This)

This is the field most commonly reversed. Population is the broader group the study’s conclusions are meant to generalize to. Sample is the specific group actually measured.

Using the worked example below: in the Aiken et al. (2021) staffing study, the population of interest is something like “adult patients in acute-care hospital settings where staffing levels vary,” a group far larger than what any single study could measure directly. The sample is the specific group the researchers actually collected data from: 1,652 nurses and hospital discharge records for 761,948 patients across 40 Chilean hospitals. The sample is always a subset of the population; if your “population” and “sample” answers describe the exact same group with the exact same number, one of them is probably wrong.

How to Spot Descriptive vs. Inferential Statistics Fast

Skim with a specific target instead of rereading the whole article top to bottom.

Descriptive statistics answer “what did the sample look like?” They show up near the start of Results, often in a table labeled something like “Participant Characteristics” or “Table 1,” and they include means, medians, modes, standard deviations, percentages, and frequency counts. No hypothesis is being tested yet; the researchers are just describing who was in the study.

Inferential statistics answer “is this relationship likely to be real, or could it be chance?” They show up later in Results, attached to the study’s actual research question, and they include p-values, correlation coefficients (r), odds ratios (OR), regression coefficients, and the results of t-tests, ANOVA, or chi-square tests. If a number in the article has a p-value sitting next to it, or is described as “significantly associated” or “predicted,” it belongs in the inferential row, not the descriptive one.

Stuck figuring out which numbers in your specific article go in which row? Send Gradevia a message on WhatsApp with the article attached and we’ll help you sort it out: +1 564-544-6924.

HLT-362V Article Analysis 1 Worked Example (3 Articles)

For reference use only. This worked example uses three real, current, peer-reviewed quantitative studies on nurse staffing and nurse burnout to demonstrate how the template gets filled in. It is not a substitute for analyzing your own three articles, and it is not one of GCU’s official Topic Resources. GCU’s own official example, using Utens et al. (2013) on COPD hospital-at-home care, is provided separately in your course materials and is worth reviewing alongside this one.

Broad topic connecting these three articles: hospital nursing workforce conditions (staffing levels, burnout, and work-family conflict) and their relationship to nurse wellbeing and patient outcomes. All three are recent, quantitative, peer-reviewed studies that would not typically appear in an HLT-362V Topic Resources list.

Common Mistakes That Cost Points on Article Analysis 1

• Using the old two-article, ten-field format. If you find an outdated study guide or a friend’s completed template from a previous term, check it against your current course template first; the field names and article count have to match what your instructor actually assigned.
• Submitting only two articles. The assignment calls for three. A strong analysis of two articles still falls short of the requirement.
• Choosing an article from your Topic Resources or textbook without realizing it. Cross-check your three choices against your assigned readings before you start writing.
• Reversing population and sample. If both fields describe the exact same group with the exact same number, revisit the methods section.
• Naming a variable without stating its data type. “Burnout” alone isn’t a complete answer; “burnout, measured as a continuous scale score” is.
• Copying the abstract’s summary sentence instead of citing a specific descriptive or inferential statistic. “The study found a significant relationship” is not a statistic; “p = .001” or “r = .42” is.
• Missing or broken permalinks. A citation without a working link back to the source is an easy, avoidable deduction.
• Forgetting the LopesWrite submission step, which flags the assignment as incomplete even if the template itself is finished.

HLT-362V Article Analysis 1 FAQ

How many articles do I need for Article Analysis 1? Three. Each one needs its own column in the Article Analysis 1 template.

Do the articles need to be peer-reviewed? The assignment directs you to search the GCU Library for quantitative health care articles; results from GCU’s nursing and health databases are predominantly peer-reviewed journal articles. Confirm peer-review status directly in the database’s filter options if you’re unsure about a specific result.

Can I use an article from my Topic Resources or textbook? No. The assignment explicitly excludes articles that already appear in your Topic Resources or textbook. Part of the assignment is demonstrating that you can locate and evaluate research on your own.

What if my article doesn’t report a clear mean or standard deviation? Look at the “Participant Characteristics” or “Table 1” section specifically; almost every quantitative study reports at least basic descriptive statistics about its sample, even if the main analysis is more complex. If a study truly reports no descriptive statistics at all, it may not be quantitative, and you should consider a different article.

Does Article Analysis 1 require full APA formatting throughout? No. APA is not required for the body of the template, but your citations and source documentation do need to follow APA 7 guidelines, including a working permalink for each article.

What is LopesWrite, and why does it matter here? LopesWrite is GCU’s originality-checking submission tool. Article Analysis 1 needs to be submitted through it, which means your analysis should be written in your own words rather than copied from the article’s abstract or results section.

Is this the same template as Article Analysis 2? Yes, Article Analysis 2 (and the later Article Analysis assignment) reuses this same eight-field template on a new set of three articles. Once you understand the fields here, later analyses go faster. See the HLT-362V Article Analysis 2 guide when that assignment comes up.

Short on time before this one’s due? Message Gradevia on WhatsApp at +1 564-544-6924. We’ll review your three articles and your draft template against the actual GCU format before you submit.

References

• Abdulmohdi, N. (2024). The relationships between nurses’ resilience, burnout, perceived organisational support and social support during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: A quantitative cross-sectional survey. Nursing Open, 11(1), e2036. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.2036
• Aiken, L. H., Simonetti, M., Sloane, D. M., Cerón, C., Soto, P., Bravo, D., Galiano, A., Behrman, J. R., Smith, H. L., McHugh, M. D., & Lake, E. T. (2021). Hospital nurse staffing and patient outcomes in Chile: A multilevel cross-sectional study. The Lancet Global Health, 9(8), e1145–e1153. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(21)00209-6
• Diao, D., Chen, X., Zhong, L., Zhang, H., & Zhang, J. (2024). Sex differences in burnout and work-family conflict among Chinese emergency nurses: A cross-sectional study. Frontiers in Public Health, 12, 1492662. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1492662
• Utens, C. M. A., Goossens, L. M. A., van Schayck, O. C. P., Rutten-van Mölken, M. P. M. H., van Litsenburg, W., Janssen, A., Termeer, E. H., Vercoulen, J. H., Kroese, J. M., Voss, G. B. W. E., Muris, J. W. M., Willemse, T., van Vliet, M., Wouters, E. F. M., & Smeenk, F. W. J. M. (2013). Patient preference and satisfaction in hospital-at-home and usual hospital care for COPD exacerbations: Results of a randomised controlled trial. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 50(11), 1537–1549. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijnurstu.2013.03.006 (Cited here because this is GCU’s own official example article for the Article Analysis 1 assignment; included outside the 2021–2026 range for that reason.)
• Grand Canyon University. (n.d.). HLT-362V: Applied Statistics for Health Care Professionals — Article Analysis 1 assignment description and template. Course materials, Grand Canyon University. (Assignment structure, template fields, and submission requirements reflected in this guide are drawn from current HLT-362V course materials; always verify against your own course shell, as instructor-level customization is possible.)