Evaluating meta-ethnography: systematic analysis and synthesis of qualitative research

Abstract

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Immigrant women's experience of maternity services in Canada: A meta-ethnography

“…A meta-ethnographic approach was used to develop an inductive and interpretive form of knowledge synthesis based on the methods by Noblit and Hare (1988) as recently modified by Campbell et al (2011) (Table 1). Meta-ethnography encompasses a comparative textual analysis of published qualitative studies.…”

“…This involves selecting relevant empirical studies to be synthesised, reading them repeatedly and noting down concepts (interpretive metaphors) that can then lead to a synthesis whereby there is translation of findings from small groups of closely related studies into one another. This approach encourages understanding and transferring of ideas, concepts and metaphors across different studies (Noblit and Hare, 1988;Campbell et al, 2011).…”

“…An assessment of the methodological quality of included articles was performed to document descriptive information on aspects of their quality rather to serve as a basis for rejecting studies (Noblit and Hare, 1988;Campbell et al, 2011). This aligns with a concern that relatively minor methodological flaws may result in insightful studies being excluded from syntheses (Sandelowski et al, 1997).…”

“…This initially involved rereading the textual syntheses for each of the thematically groups (referring back to the original papers where clarification was necessary) to produce an overall textual synthesis of immigrant women's experiences of maternity care (Table 5). This overall textual synthesis was a 'lines-of-argument' synthesis (Noblit and Hare, 1988) or 'third order' interpretation (Campbell et al, 2011). The 'lines-of-argument' synthesis involved first translating studies into each other and then constructing an interpretation that may serve to discover what was hidden in individual studies to illuminate overarching synthesis (Campbell et al, 2011;Noblit and Hare, 1988).…”

“…This overall textual synthesis was a 'lines-of-argument' synthesis (Noblit and Hare, 1988) or 'third order' interpretation (Campbell et al, 2011). The 'lines-of-argument' synthesis involved first translating studies into each other and then constructing an interpretation that may serve to discover what was hidden in individual studies to illuminate overarching synthesis (Campbell et al, 2011;Noblit and Hare, 1988). 7…”