Establishing confidence in the output of qualitative research synthesis: the ConQual approach

By Z. Munn, K. Porritt, C. Lockwood, E. Aromataris, A. Pearson. BMC Medical Research Methodology, 2014

757 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundThe importance of findings derived from syntheses of qualitative research has been increasingly acknowledged. Findings that arise from qualitative syntheses inform questions of practice and policy in their own right and are commonly used to complement findings from quantitative research syntheses. The GRADE approach has been widely adopted by international organisations to rate the quality and confidence of the findings of quantitative systematic reviews. To date, there has been no widely accepted corresponding approach to assist health care professionals and policy makers in establishing confidence in the synthesised findings of qualitative systematic reviews.MethodsA methodological group was formed develop a process to assess the confidence in synthesised qualitative research findings and develop a Summary of Findings tables for meta-aggregative qualitative systematic reviews.ResultsDependability and credibility are two elements considered by the methodological group to influence the confidence of qualitative synthesised findings. A set of critical appraisal questions are proposed to establish dependability, whilst credibility can be ranked according to the goodness of fit between the author’s interpretation and the original data. By following the processes outlined in this article, an overall ranking can be assigned to rate the confidence of synthesised qualitative findings, a system we have labelled ConQual.ConclusionsThe development and use of the ConQual approach will assist users of qualitative systematic reviews to establish confidence in the evidence produced in these types of reviews and can serve as a practical tool to assist in decision making.

Subfields: Education, General Health Professions, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b4da9a01c02252541020f8206aadc259fb94e903

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Education

1. Andrew Booth
2. S. Lewin

In General Health Professions

1. Z. Munn
2. C. Lockwood
3. Andrew Booth
4. J. Noyes
5. S. Lewin
6. Tove Faber Frandsen
7. M. Eriksen
8. R. Cadario

In Statistics and Probability

1. Z. Munn
2. C. Lockwood
3. Andrew Booth

Citations in the corpus

• Using Qualitative Evidence in Decision Making for Health and Social Interventions: An Approach to Assess Confidence in Findings from Qualitative Evidence Syntheses (GRADE-CERQual) (2015, background): “At present, there is no established approach for indicating how confident we can be in the findings from qualitative evidence syntheses, although one previous study attempted to adapt the GRADE approach to qualitative review findings in a mixed-methods synthesis [11], while another study described a”
• Qualitative research synthesis: methodological guidance for systematic reviewers utilizing meta-aggregation (2015, methodology): “Qualitative systematic reviews have investigated the culture of communities, exploring how consumers experience, perceive and manage their health and journey through the health system, and can evaluate components and activities of health services such as health promotion and community development.(1”
• Implications for COVID-19: A systematic review of nurses’ experiences of working in acute care hospital settings during a respiratory pandemic (2020, methodology): “The qualitative findings were rated according to JBI Levels of Credibility (Munn et al., 2014) , as unequivocal, credible or unsupported.”