Hi Sarah,
I have some experience working at the interface between health and
design through our work on medicine information design (packaging,
labelling, pack inserts, treatment guides etc.)
There is a real problem with the research literature in this field.
Most of the research coming from a health background does not satisfy
the kind of criteria we apply to research in information design.
We have done a number of critical literature reviews in this area,
some of which have been published. Of most interest in this context
might be our review of the literature on usable medicines information:
http://www.communication.org.au/htdocs/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=85
In particular, chapter 2 in Part 1: Criteria for selecting works pp
21-8.
David
--
blog: www.communication.org.au/dsblog
web: http://www.communication.org.au
On 27/11/2007, at 8:07 PM, Sarah Rosenbaum wrote:
> Hi Gavin
> I'm aware that researchers from other disciplines than health might
> find the
> search strategy in this report too narrow, as it's only looking for
> RCT's
> and systematic reviews. The institute I work in has close ties to the
> Cochrane Collaboration, so the initial angle here will tend to be
> quite
> narrow: the most reliable method of measuring effect of an
> intervention is a
> randomized controled trial. But it is becoming more widely accepted
> that as
> you move into complex interventions, a randomized controlled trial
> is not
> always possible or feasible to do. We see that interupted time series
> analysis can be an alternative reliable way of reporting effect when a
> controlled trial is not possible. There are also researchers here
> who are
> looking at reliable methods for producing systemtic summaries of
> qualitative
> research to accompany Cochrane reviews (which are only quantitative
> data) in
> order to answer more than "does it work?" but also "why?" or "why
> not?" or
> "how is this intervention experienced by patients?". So a report
> like this
> could definitely be expanded by searching for a wider range of study
> designs, or by expanding the research question.
>
> Sarah
>
>
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