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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