HI Gill---
Excellent answer! I really appreciate the point by point layout.
I totally agree that most reviews are actually high on the relevance and usefulness rating, but I was also stuck with how to actually report it. Your feedback has really framed it nicely for me.
Kelly
________________________________________
Kelly McShane, Ph.D., C. Psych.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Ryerson University
350 Victoria Street
Toronto Ontario Canada M5B 2K3
Phone: 416-979-5000, ext 2051 (after pressing 1)
Email: [log in to unmask]
________________________________________
From: Gill Westhorp [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, May 29, 2013 10:49 PM
To: 'Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards'; Kelly McShane
Subject: RE: Reporting Review Papers in a Realist Review
Hi Kelly
My experience with using systematic (and many other) reviews has been that
they haven't been all that useful for informing realist reviews, usually
because they "hid" most of the information one most needs in order to
undertake a realist review. I've mainly used them for snowballing (checking
references for original studies etc).
But "in principle" (and with a view to prompting input from others), my
thoughts would be something like:
a) You don't need to report all of the previous review, because you only
draw on and report what's relevant to the realist question under
consideration, so the first question would be: For what aspect(s) of your
rough theory of change does the previous review provide evidence?
b) For that aspect of your theory, what evidence does the previous review
actually provide? Is it only about outcomes? Is it about 'outcomes for
whom'? Or 'outcomes for particular contexts?'
c) How does the evidence in the previous review 'fit' (or not) with the
evidence from other sources you're using? What analytic processes will you
be using to make sense of the relationship between that evidence and the
evidence from other sources? (EG Pawson 2006, p 74-76: juxtaposing,
reconciling, adjudicating, consolidating, situating)
d) How does the evidence from the previous review suggest that your rough
theory should be refined?
If I could answer all those questions, I'd know 'where' in my synthesis the
information from the previous review fitted, what information I'd be drawing
from it, how to approach the analysis, and what it implied for my findings.
Cheers
Gill
-----Original Message-----
From: Realist and Meta-narrative Evidence Synthesis: Evolving Standards
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Kelly McShane
Sent: Wednesday, 29 May 2013 10:24 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Reporting Review Papers in a Realist Review
Hi All,
My students and I are working on a realist review of brief alcohol
interventions in emergency rooms and have encountered (yet again) the
nagging question about how to report review articles that are included in
our own review. So--- we have our wonderful table, and on the advice of a
great reviewer from a previous manuscript, we will separate out all
non-empirical papers. The challenge we have now is what range of information
to report on the systematic reviews. My motto is to be succinctly
comprehensive, but this is proving challenging!
Thoughts? Suggestions? Examples?
Kelly
________________________________________
Kelly McShane, Ph.D., C. Psych.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Ryerson University
350 Victoria Street
Toronto Ontario Canada M5B 2K3
Phone: 416-979-5000, ext 2051 (after pressing 1)
Email: [log in to unmask]
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