Athletic Training Research Guide:Using PICO to Ask Your Question

Evidence based practice is all about using research to guide your approach to a question or problem at hand. As a practitioner of this approach, it's imperative that you can research effectively - and to do that, you must learn how to create a well-written question with all of the keywords or terms that will lead you to finding relevant articles and sources.

Step One: Know Your Background Information

As you progress professionally in this field, you're background knowledge of relevant topics will grow, but starting out, you may find the need to do some background research before jumping into finding those more in-depth articles.

Background research seeks general knowledge about a condition, treatment approach, etc.:

• This is a broad picture, we're looking at the forest if you will.
• This ensures when you move into the next step, you have a grounded understanding of related concepts and aspects to consider.
• Sources for background information can be from textbooks, encyclopedias, and other background resources. (See Background Info page).
• Background research often has three components:
  • who/what/how/when etc.
  • a verb (causes, have, does, is, treat, affect, etc.)
  • topic (a disorder, treatment, test, etc.)
  • Example: What is cryotherapy treatment? 

Step Two: Research the Specifics

Welcome to stepping into the world of evidence based practice! You have your background knowledge, now it's time to ask the tough questions.

• This is where we enter specifics, we learned about the forest, now it's time to look at the trees. 
• Peer-review research is where we're going to look for the majority of our literature.
• This is where PICO comes into play (review box to the right).

What is PICO exactly?

PICO is a mnemonic term that will lead you to establishing your research question. Broken down, look at PICO as follows:

P = Patient/Client Group - Who are you focusing on (adults, children, baseball players, athletes, males, females, etc. - combinations can be made, such as female soccer players)

I = Intervention (or Assessment) - What main intervention or assessment are you interested in?

C = Comparison - Is there an alternative to compare with the intervention?

O = Outcome(s) - What is my end goal? What do I hope to measure, improve, accomplish? 

Example:

P - Female Soccer Players

I - Cryotherapy treatment

C - NSAIDs (Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs)

O - relieve chronic pain symptoms

Question: In comparison to using nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), does cryotherapy treatment effectively relieve chronic pain symptoms in female soccer players?