ouaga coast presentation research synthesis.ppt

Helping in the studies of research

1. Research synthesis:
What, why and how?
Dr Ernestina Coast

2. Research synthesis
What is known from what has been done?
NOT
What has been done?

3. Many different types of research
synthesis
Systematic review
Meta-ethnography (qualitative)
Meta-analysis (quantitative)

4. What is research synthesis?
A comprehensive review that looks for, and
evaluates, existing research evidence.
NOT
“Traditional” literature review

5. Characteristics
Rigorous methods
A “scientific” methodology
Replicable / accountable / updateable
Minimise bias and error
Answer to focussed question(s)

6. Why useful?
Balanced inference on best available
evidence
NOT
Description of everything on the subject

7. Quantitative systematic reviews
Well-established
Well-funded
National and international collaborations
Associated with RCTs
Associated with intervention research i.e.: “What
works”?
A cornerstone of evidence-based practice and policy

8. Research synthesis: 5 steps
1.Decide what question(s) you are trying to
answer
2.Identify a protocol
What evidence are you prepared to include?
3.Find all of the relevant evidence
Data mapping an output in its own right?
Identify major knowledge gaps
4.Appraise the quality of the evidence
5.Decide what the evidence means

9. Recent UK example: DiCenso et al,
2003
Objective: To review the effectiveness
of primary prevention strategies aimed at
delaying sexual intercourse, improving
use of birth control, and reducing
incidence of unintended pregnancy in
adolescents.

10. Study selection: 26 trials described in
22 published and unpublished reports that
randomised adolescents to an intervention or a
control group (alternate intervention or
nothing).
Data extraction: Two independent reviewers
assessed methodological quality and abstracted
data.

11. Copyright ©2002 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd.
DiCenso, A. et al. BMJ 2002;324:1426
Effect of interventions on whether adolescents used birth control the last
time they had sexual intercourse

12. Qualitative research as postscript
“insidious discrimination”
Via
“institutionalised quantitativism”
Booth (2001)
Meta-ethnography
Education
Nursing

13. Are qualitative research (data) appropriate for
research synthesis?
Unlikely to use RCT design
Less likely to have been used as methodology for
intervention research
Where to search for evidence?
“qualitative research clearly has a role…but it is
unclear how systematic reviews of qualitative
research can contribute…..”

14. 5 steps revisited: qualitative evidence
1.Decide what question you are trying to answer
2.Identify a protocol
What evidence are you prepared to include?
3.Find all of the relevant evidence
Likely to involve lots of hand searching
Language
Qualitative research tends to be less well indexed than
quantitative research
4.Appraise the quality of the evidence
Different or same as for quantitative evidence?
5.Decide what the evidence means

15. Uniqueness of the ethnographic method is
reflexivity
Richness of insight: an emphasis on
contradictory cases
Existence of multiple views/ perspectives
Alternative interpretations
Potentially competing explanations

16. Research synthesis very limited in forms of
evidence that are incorporated
Need robust ways of incorporating
qualitative evidence into research synthesis
A more holistic view of what constitutes
“evidence”

17. Alternatively….
Policy issues not the business of academic
researchers
Try writing that on a funding proposal……
Role of an academic researcher is not to seek
common ground
Post-modernity
Absolute evidence does not exist

18. Synthesis of qualitative research
Bayesian approaches?
Use qualitative evidence to identify variables for
synthesis then attach weights to strength of
quantitative evidence associated with these variables
A proliferation of checklists

19. Meta-ethnography a sign of
“methodological maturity”?
Not a call for uncritical translation of
quantitative research synthesis approaches
Stand-alone or integrated
Quantitative supremacy?