ANALYTIC TECHNIQUES FOR QUALITATIVE METASYNTHESIS

University Of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

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Abstract

Despite the proliferation of qualitative research in the health field, concerns is the relative absence of efforts to integrate the findings from this research. Qualitative research findings contain information on the subtleties and complexities of human responses to disease and its treatment that is essential to the construction of developmentally and culturally sensitive instruments to appraise health conditions and appropriate interventions to improve them. But for qualitative research findings to matter, they must be available to researchers and practitioners in forms that are useful. Accordingly, the immediate aim of the proposed study is to develop the analytic and interpretive techniques to conduct qualitative metasynthesis projects, using research on women with HIV/AIDS as the "method case." The long-term goal is to enhance the utilization of qualitative findings as a basis for research and practice. Research on women with HIV/AIDS has been selected as the specific locus because a sufficient number of qualitative studies exist here to warrant metasynthesis and it is a field of great significance to women's health and nursing practice. HIV infection is also a priority area of Healthy People 2000. The techniques to be used to construct a systematic protocol for qualitative metasynthesis include: a) use of several information channels to retrieve studies; b) the development of tools to determine the distinctive elements and appraise the quality of each study; and c) the development of guidelines for choosing and applying the analytic, interpretative, and representational techniques to conduct and create metasynthesis. Techniques to be used to enhance the validity of the protocol include: a) the auditory trail; b) negotiation of consensual validity; c) expert peer review; and, d) application of the protocol to a "test case" (i.e., research on experiences with prenatal testing). The outcome of the his project be a user-friendly protocol for conducting qualitative metasynthesis in any domain of research and metasynthesis of qualitative findings on women with HIV/AIDS and on couples undergoing prenatal testing.