American Educational Research Association diversity officer George Wimberly introduces the workshop, which has over 4,000 participants from all over the world. Dr. Mia Ong at the Institute for Meta-Synthesis, TERC, is the first presenter. She and her team (consisting of Nuria Jaumot-Pascual, Lisette Torres-Gerald, and Christina B. Silva, who are all presenting at this workshop) have many year's experience of working with qualitative meta-synthesis and they outline the flow in the qualitative meta-synthesis process. The difference between a systematic meta-synthesis, which "goes one step further" in terms of analysis, compared to a systematic literature review, which primarily is descriptive. The goal is to get as much data as possible in a systematic manner, illiciting analytically strong meta-findings.
Dr. Nuria Jaumot-Pascual focuses on how to search for articles: search terms, boolean operators – for instance "engineer* (wom*n | gender | female*) (Black | African)" – and then limits the number of hits by indicating year of publication. She continues to describe the search and selection process, the search criteria (drawing on the definition and purpose of the study). A good definition of the "synthesis question" becomes crucial.
It is important to keep track of the searches that have been made and the filters that have been applied.
The start set is thus the result of the synthesis question and the filters and the quality appraisal.
Researcher Christina B. Silva takes over after a short break and talks about forward and backward snowballing. The limits to snowballing has to do with budget and time, but they generally perform two rounds of snowballing.
In the Q&A they get the questions on what to include from their searches and Dr. Ong responds that they have previously allowed material that may not have been published, such as dissertations and conference proceedings or texts. They snowball
all texts.
The next topic, the analytic process, is presented by Lisette Torres-Gerald.
Torres-Gerald highlights the categories deductive, inductive and hybrid coding.
Keep track of the coding that happens over time in a code book and have coding meetings in order to avoid coding drift.
Christina B. Silva returns and talks about synthesis memos, a tool used to distill information relevant to the synthesis research question/purpose, which is particularly useful when dealing with large masses of texts, for instance from books or dissertations.
The following is an example from a synthesis memo:
They have found that it is difficult to synthesise qualitative and quantitative studies, so they tend to avoid mixed methods approaches, however, they sometimes do so and they rely on Heyvaert, Hannes, and Onghena's
"Using Mixed Methods Research Synthesis for Literature Reviews" in these cases.
Dr. Ong continues by talking about thematic analysis.
She then focuses on findings and discussion, i.e. moving from the specific and concrete to the general and abstract. The findings summarise and describe what they have learned in the synthesis and answer the synthesis question(s) and answer to the themes identified during the thematic analysis. The discussion presents the theoretical and practical significance of the synthesis findings and looks at the findings through the lens of theoretical framework. It identifies trends, strengths and limitations, convergence and/or divergence, ways to extend current theory, and recommendations.
The research group stresses that this type of meta-synthesis research takes
a lot of time and it's very difficult to do alone.
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