I am going to eventually work through a practice meta synthesis, in stages. As I said in the prior post, the idea of doing this for real is intimidating and less than exciting. But I set myself a goal of giving it a trial run at the beginning of the semester, so I am planning to work through a 'mini' meta synthesis and describe the steps as I complete them. The first thing I wanted to do to initiate this process was to obtain the assessment form used by Sandelowski and Barroso in their 2007 book Synthesizing qualitative research (New York, Springer). This was not so easy; the web link from the book was dead. I did eventually find the website that contained the articles generated by and cited in the meta synthesis project the book describes. It is an analysis of qualitative research about women with HIV/AIDS who are also mothers. The justification for and sample of the form is actually contained in a 2002 article from the International Journal of Qualitative Methods ("Reading qualitative studies," by M. Sandelowski & J. Barroso, 2002; volume 1, issue 1, article 5). This journal, by the way, is open access. Check it out at: http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/IJQM/index Using Acrobat Pro, I separated out the appraisal form pages from the rest of the article. Since this is not a fillable form, I sent it to a free file conversion service (http://www.zamzar.com/) to be converted to a docx file. Unfortunately, due to the tables and formatting, it is still a mess. I am working through it line by line to clea it up, but I may quickly decide it is just as easy to recreate the form from scratch. Below is the PDF version from the 2002 article so you can get an idea of what this form looks like. Next stage in this process is to identify for certain the articles I am going to 'test pilot' for meta synthesis. I have some in mind but I am also going to consider some other alternatives that might be more directly relevant to my (revised plan for) dissertation research.
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AuthorI am Sheryl L. Chatfield, Ph.D, C.T.R.S. I am a member of the faculty in the College of Public Health at Kent State University. I also Co-coordinate the Graduate Certificate in Qualitative Research and I am a member of the Design Innovation Team at Kent State. Archives
February 2024
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