Final answer:
Middle-range theories provide specific focus, reflect nursing practice, and help differentiate nursing from medical practice, offering a valuable framework for research in nursing informatics.
Step-by-step explanation:
The advantage of using a middle-range theory in supporting a research study, particularly in the field of nursing informatics, includes its capability to focus on specific phenomena, which makes the theory more applicable and testable within a particular context. Middle-range theories are also advantageous because they reflect nursing practice by providing a clear connection between abstract theoretical concepts and real-world nursing activities. While they may not describe the broadest scope of nursing phenomena like grand theories, they do provide valuable insights into particular aspects of patient care, and they help in differentiating between nursing and medical practice by aligning specific factors to the nursing perspective.
Medical anthropologists, for example, integrate such theories with their methods to craft personalized studies that reflect the complex interplay between human health, culture, and biological factors. This personalized approach is thanks to the comprehensive understanding that middle-range theories offer of the particular phenomenon being studied, providing a valuable framework for research that can lead to practical improvements in nursing practice.