A useful research question tells you what you need to learn and what would count as an answer. “What is the best rehabilitation?” cannot do either job. It hides the population, the comparison and the outcome behind one broad word: best.
For a PT assignment, start by writing the decision in everyday language. Then use PICO to expose missing detail. PICO identifies the population or problem, intervention, comparison and outcome. Oxford’s Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine presents it as a way to focus questions and guide evidence searches. It is a starting structure, not a guarantee that a search will find a reliable answer. Oxford CEBM.
The exercise below is an original teaching example. It does not recommend an intervention or report findings from a real trial.
Begin with the decision
Imagine a fictional placement discussion about adults who have completed a supervised rehabilitation programme. The team wants to understand whether adding scheduled follow-up calls helps people continue their agreed home activities. Your assignment is to investigate the evidence, not to decide that calls must work.
A first draft might read: “Do phone calls improve adherence?” That is searchable, but it leaves important questions unresolved. Calls from whom? Compared with what? Does adherence mean remembering instructions, reporting activity or completing a particular proportion of sessions?
Write a more explicit question:
In adults completing a defined outpatient rehabilitation programme, do scheduled follow-up calls, compared with the same discharge information without scheduled calls, improve completion of agreed home activities over the next eight weeks?
“Eight weeks” is a choice in this fictional assignment, not an evidence-based optimum. Naming it makes the requested follow-up visible. If your assignment concerns six months, change the question before you interpret the results.
Build the question without building in the answer
| Element | Working definition | Detail still to clarify |
|---|---|---|
| Population | Adults completing outpatient rehabilitation | Which condition and programme? |
| Intervention | Scheduled follow-up calls | Who calls, how often and for what purpose? |
| Comparison | The same discharge information, without scheduled calls | Is other contact still available? |
| Outcome | Completion of agreed home activities | How is completion measured? |
| Time | Eight weeks after discharge | Is that the decision-relevant period? |
Notice what the table does not say: it does not call the intervention effective, low cost or easy to deliver. Those are claims to investigate. Describing the comparison carefully also prevents you from treating “usual care” as though it meant exactly the same thing in every study.
Turn the question into a search in stages
Do not feel obliged to put every PICO term into the first search. A comparison or outcome may be described inconsistently across papers. Requiring all of your wording can exclude relevant work.
A practical first attempt might combine a population concept and an intervention concept:
(rehabilitation OR physiotherapy OR physical therapy) AND (telephone OR phone OR telephonic) AND (follow-up OR support)
This is an illustrative search string. A database’s indexing and search syntax may require changes. It is not a validated systematic-review strategy. Look at a few relevant results, identify the terminology authors use, and revise deliberately. If your course requires a reproducible search, record the database, exact query, date and filters rather than saying “I searched online.”
Suppose the initial results concern exercise advice delivered entirely by telephone. That is not the same intervention as brief follow-up after an in-person programme. You have learned something useful about the search: it needs a discharge or post-programme concept, or more careful screening.
Screen for the question you actually asked
Consider three fictional abstracts:
- Study A: scheduled calls after discharge, with completion of home activities recorded for eight weeks.
- Study B: satisfaction with telephone appointments, measured after one visit.
- Study C: interviews about why people stop doing home activities.
Study A appears closest to the intervention question. You still need its methods and results before judging the evidence. Study B may help with acceptability, but satisfaction is not your specified outcome. Study C may explain barriers worth considering even though it does not estimate the effect of calls.
This distinction prevents a common error: collecting several relevant-sounding papers and treating them as interchangeable answers. Keep an “answers which part?” column beside each citation. A paper can be useful without answering the main question.
Record uncertainty instead of filling the gap
A search may find no closely matching study. Do not convert that into “the intervention does not work.” Your search might have missed relevant terminology, the evidence might concern another population, or the question might not have been studied directly.
Write what happened: “This search found studies of telephone-delivered care, but none yet identified matched post-discharge follow-up plus the specified activity outcome.” Then ask a librarian or educator to review the search if the answer matters to your assignment or placement discussion.
Keep your conclusions proportional to what you read. An abstract that reports an improvement without a comparison cannot establish the additional effect of scheduled calls. A study measuring attendance does not automatically answer a question about home activity.
Try a different outcome
Revise the question so that the outcome becomes confidence managing the home programme. What needs to change?
The intervention and population might stay the same. The outcome definition, measurement approach and search terms need review. You must also stop treating completed activity and confidence as equivalent. Someone can feel confident yet complete fewer activities; another person can follow the plan while remaining unsure.
Your next step is to write one decision, one focused question and one reproducible first search. Bring those three items to the next discussion. They make it easier for an educator to see whether the gap is in the question, the search or the interpretation.
Sources and further reading
- Asking focused questions — Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine — PICO elements and matching the question to the search.