9.0 Limitations

Read the limitations recognised in this review.

There were several limitations to this research. These consisted of the below.

• There were some difficulties obtaining equal representation across the 4 groups: students, members of staff at an higher education institution (HEI), practice education leads (clinical placements) and members of professional groups/regulatory bodies. Staff at higher education institutions (HEIs) consisted of 40.7% of all participants in comparison to members of professional/regulatory groups, who only represented 13.7% of participants. Practice education facilitators represented 17.5% of respondents and students represented 28.1% of respondents. This caused a disparity across scores, which resulted in an unequal representation of opinions across groups. This continued as an issue in the focus groups. Despite there being 52 registrations, only 7 were students. In contrast, staff from HEIs represented almost half of focus group participants, with a total of 25 registrants. This resulted in an unequal number of roles and thus, made it more difficult to ensure there was representation from all groups within the breakout rooms. Because of this, it was easier for HEIs to influence and reinforce their opinions, leaving fewer opportunities for students to be more vocal.
• In addition, there was also difficulty obtaining representation from each profession, making it difficult to recognise and illustrate the current use and teaching of digital technology from specific professions. This also created additional bias in overall responses, as most opinions are formed from subjects with the most representatives. For example, in the survey, 45% of students studied Psychology, with most of the other professions only having a response rate of 0-11%. Overall, nursing had the highest number of responses from all groups (35.3%) in comparison to the other professions which ranged from 0-17.2%.
• Time constraints were also a limiting factor for this report. For example, due to the survey being conducted over the Christmas period, it was acknowledged that universities may have been closed and individuals would be on annual leave which may have limited participant engagement.
• Terminology surrounding digital technology has also been a limitation for this piece of work, due to the different interpretations and definitions of digital technologies and digital literacy. This report uses terminology that may come across as “vague” or “expansive” and so it can be difficult to obtain clear and direct answers when asking questions related to digital technologies. Please see Appendix A for the terminology that was referenced throughout this project.

Despite these limitations the findings are generally consistent with the findings from similar studies.