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Dear all,
At the moment, I am taking my first steps in conducting a realist review on the topic of integration/collaboration between primary health care and social work practice.
After digging through many examples and reading the RAMESES training materials, I am still indecisive about one fundamental part of the review process. There seem to be two general approaches.
1. Some reviews start with building preliminary programme theories based on their reading of the broad literature and/or conversations with important stakeholders. Next, these papers test their preliminary theories based on the papers they retrieved from their systematic search. When they report their findings, this are two distinct steps.
2. Other reviews seem to focus on the theory-building aspect and not so much on the process of testing how the theories hold up as a separate step in the process (although they often refer to empirical evidence to build their arguments).
My realist review will inform further primary research to test the preliminary programme theories in interventions where primary care and social work practice work together. Given this ambition, I feel inclined to follow the second approach. Starting with a systematic search of the literature on primary care and social work, digging for generative mechanisms in these papers and presenting these as (preliminary) programme theories / CMO-configurations. This also seems more manageable in the context of my PhD.
A lot of words just to ask whether I can “claim” doing a realist review if I solely focus on identifying mechanisms based on the available literature and keep the explicit testing for a next empirical paper?
In May, I am attending the course on Realist Evaluation and Synthesis at Oxford University hosted by Geoff Wong and I am hoping to prepare for this by advancing this review the next couple of months. So, all input to get me started is more than welcome.
Thank you!
Kind regards,
Didier Boost
University of Antwerp, Centre for Research on Environmental and Social Change
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