Health Professions Education and Educational Research (HealthPEER), Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Med Educ. 2013 Mar;47(3):252-60. doi: 10.1111/medu.12092.
Formal qualitative synthesis is the process of pooling qualitative and mixed-method research data, and then drawing conclusions regarding the collective meaning of the research. Qualitative synthesis is regularly used within systematic reviews in the health professions literature, although such use has been heavily debated in the general literature. This controversy arises in part from the inherent tensions found when generalisations are derived from in-depth studies that are heavily context-dependent.
We explore three representative qualitative synthesis methodologies: thematic analysis; meta-ethnography, and realist synthesis. These can be understood across two dimensions: integrative to interpretative, and idealist to realist. Three examples are used to illustrate the relative strengths and limitations of these approaches.
Against a backdrop of controversy and diverse methodologies, readers must take a critical stand when reading literature reviews that use qualitative synthesis to derive their findings. We argue that notions of qualitative rigour such as transparency and acknowledgment of the researchers' stance should be applied to qualitative synthesis.
正式的定性综合是汇集定性和混合方法研究数据的过程，然后得出关于研究集体意义的结论。定性综合经常在健康专业文献的系统综述中使用，尽管这种使用在一般文献中受到了广泛的争论。这种争议部分源于从深度研究中得出概括时存在的固有紧张关系，这些研究高度依赖于背景。
我们探索了三种有代表性的定性综合方法：主题分析；元民族志和现实主义综合。这些方法可以从两个维度来理解：综合到解释，理想主义到现实主义。使用三个例子来说明这些方法的相对优势和局限性。
在争议和多种方法的背景下，读者在阅读使用定性综合来得出其发现的文献综述时，必须采取批判性立场。我们认为，应该将定性严谨性的概念（如透明度和承认研究人员的立场）应用于定性综合。
