Greetings all,


I searched the list archives, and could not find this question addressed (though there are several that discuss the formation and uses of PICO - as well as Andrew Booth's collection of wild-type PICO variants from 2009).


A colleague of mine wishes to know:
Has anyone developed and validated a rubric or other tool for evaluating the quality of a PICO question?


The trick to this question, I think, is defining what "quality" is:  output from a search? adequate representation of a learning need? or merely well-structured (which is somewhat recursive to the definition of the PICO question)?


I imagine the outcomes for a output-based validation study would be the quality of the output of a database search (medline, embase, etc.), but the more I think about how one would assess this quality, things start spinning in my head.


In the sense of learning need, I'm also somewhat of the mind that a "good" PICO question is best "validated" by the person asking the question themselves - does it really represent what they assess is their own learning need (or might that be adjudicated by something like cognitive task analysis)?


Assessing the degree of "well-constructedness" of a PICO question - seems fairly straightforward and may not require "validation" as it's a relatively artificial construct to begin with.


Does anyone have any pertinent references I can share with my colleague?  Am I thinking about this the right way?


Thanks in advance,


John


John Epling, MD, MSEd, FAAFP

Associate Professor and Chair
Department of Family Medicine
Co-Director, Studying-Acting-Learning-Teaching Network (SALT-Net)
Associate Professor, Public Health and Preventive Medicine
SUNY-Upstate Medical University
Syracuse, NY
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Clinical: http://www.upstate.edu/findadoc/eplingj
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