Transdisciplinary working to shape systematic reviews and interpret the findings: commentary

Abstract

Important policy questions tend to span a range of academic disciplines, and the relevant research is often carried out in a variety of social, economic and geographic contexts. In efforts to synthesise research to help inform decisions arising from the policy questions, systematic reviews need conceptual frameworks and ways of thinking that combine knowledge drawn from different academic traditions and contexts; in other words, transdisciplinary research. This paper considers how transdisciplinary working can be achieved with: conceptual frameworks that span traditional academic boundaries; methods for shaping review questions and conceptual frameworks; and methods for interpreting the relevance of findings to different contexts. It also discusses the practical challenges and ultimate benefits of transdisciplinary working for systematic reviews.

Healing The Past By Nurturing The Future: A qualitative systematic review and meta-synthesis of pregnancy, birth and early postpartum experiences and views of parents with a history of childhood maltreatment

“…Two reviewers independently extracted data related to the sample characteristics (including PROGRESS-Plus criteria, used to identify equity-relevant characteristics reported in studies) [38], study aims and scope, and risk of bias assessments into an Excel spreadsheet. These data were imported into NVivo 12 software [39] as file attributes, as presented in the S3 Appendix.…”

What have we learned after ten years of systematic reviews in international development?

“…There have been a number of calls for the incorporation of programme theory into systematic reviews over the years (for example, Pawson 2002;Davies 2006;van der Knaap et al, 2008;Anderson et al 2011;Waddington et al 2012;Snilstveit 2012;Kneale, Thomas, and Harris 2015;Maden et al 2017;White 2018), as well as for multi-disciplinary working (for example, Thomas et al 2004;Snilstveit 2012;Oliver et al 2017;White 2018). Programme theory is usually incorporated into systematic reviews through logic models (flow diagrams which present the intervention causal chain from inputs through to final outcomes) or theories of change (which articulate the assumptions underlying the causal chain and the contexts and stakeholders for whom the intervention is relevant), and sometimes through economic, social or psychological theory to help articulate programme mechanisms.…”

Methodological reflections on the use of systematic reviews in early childhood research

“…It is also perceived as an effective medium for enabling knowledge to be accumulated in a manageable way (Harden and Thomas, 2005). On the other hand, researchers have also documented the challenges that arise from systematic reviews particularly in its application to cross-disciplinary research and alternative methodologies (Oliver et al, 2017). Systematic reviews for instance, are largely perceived to be intervention based through the synthesis of statistical impact evaluation studies that offer attributable, causal estimates (Jeffery et al, 2015); and Dunne (2011) contends that the place of literature reviews in qualitative methodologies can be ‘a polemical and divisive issue’ (p. 111) given the tensions that arise from the influence of existing, competing frameworks, hypotheses or other theoretical ideas upon the data.…”