I read most of this book (Springer, 2007) yesterday. I think it is a useful description of the process of any systematic (or meta-analytic) type review. The description of how to initiate and conduct a persistent and comprehensive search is especially helpful. I decided after reading this book that I really do not have a lot of desire to conduct a meta-synthesis, or other qualitative systematic review, or a similarly systematic review of quantitative studies. The process seems extremely tedious and I am less excited about research that is entirely done inside with a computer (well, to be fair, there are external parts to the search), than about research with actual people in actual other (out of the university) places.
I also began to think about the practice of writing 'reviews of literature' to no particular end in courses, especially graduate courses. In many of the fields with graduate programs, it would take a great deal of time and effort simply to do a decent search for a systematic review. Sandelowski and Barroso described the lengths they went to to obtain and review theses and dissertations, book chapters (not necessarily indexed in dbases) and other studies. Instead, what I see is half-hearted database, or worse yet, Google (scholar) search efforts (I know that some students even limit to 'full text only' results), that result in a few up to several research articles that are, in the best cases, summarized and organized in some meaningful way and in other instances, reported in no particular order like a series of short book reports. I think that the original goal of assigning a review of lit in a class was to provide students with an opportunity to write a 'research paper' without conducting actual research. But in seeing how far this type of 'review' differs from the process that includes not only a comprehensive search but also a thorough assessment of each article to see if it merits inclusion, as was described by Sandelowski and Barroso, I see very little value in stand alone reviews of literature. This type of assignment might have made more sense 20 years ago when it was physically more difficult to find huge numbers of results (and there were somewhat fewer); now it is not uncommon for me to begin with numbers in the 10,000s when searching some of the more heavily researched health or physical activity topics. The review of literature presented in an actual research paper can and should represent far less of the total literature and should be targeted toward the research to be reported. It seems to me that more time should be spent teaching students to assemble this segment of a research paper, along with the rest of the research paper, rather than writing a sketchy, usually narrative review. I would advocate having students conduct small simple research projects so they can get in the practice of writing the kind of works (and thinking about design) that can be published. I know that mediocre (or worse) review of lit get pu
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
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
Categories
|