at the Institute for Health and Human Development (IHHD) based at UeL we are conducting a meta-narrative systematic review on the meanings of community from different research traditions (sociology, psychology, anthropology etc) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The idea is to build 'storylines' from each research tradition and compare research across these.
At the moment, we are in the process of coding about 250 initial references based upon a database search on the concept/meanings of community, alongside other sources such as our own searches and outcomes from an academic and policy advisory groups. We hope to identify key authors in each research tradition and build from that a range of draft meta-narratives (based on Trisha Greenhalgh's work).
What i would like to ask the group is whether they have been engaged in similar work and whether they can provide any useful tip or lessons they learnt, even from the 'realist' type of work they have been engaged in. A specific problem that is tormenting me is the theoretical level of the 'storylines'. We don't want to repeat longstanding work on community but provide some sort of middle range theories (I don't really know if I am using the right terminology here). I would like to interact with anybody who has faced such problems in the past.
i am obviously happy to provide further details if needed.
Marcello
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