Munn Zachary, Porritt Kylie, Lockwood Craig, Aromataris Edoardo, Pearson Alan
The Joanna Briggs Institute, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, 5005, South Australia.
BMC Med Res Methodol. 2014 Sep 20;14:108. doi: 10.1186/1471-2288-14-108.
The importance of findings derived from syntheses of qualitative research has been increasingly acknowledged. Findings that arise from qualitative syntheses inform questions of practice and policy in their own right and are commonly used to complement findings from quantitative research syntheses. The GRADE approach has been widely adopted by international organisations to rate the quality and confidence of the findings of quantitative systematic reviews. To date, there has been no widely accepted corresponding approach to assist health care professionals and policy makers in establishing confidence in the synthesised findings of qualitative systematic reviews.
A methodological group was formed develop a process to assess the confidence in synthesised qualitative research findings and develop a Summary of Findings tables for meta-aggregative qualitative systematic reviews.
Dependability and credibility are two elements considered by the methodological group to influence the confidence of qualitative synthesised findings. A set of critical appraisal questions are proposed to establish dependability, whilst credibility can be ranked according to the goodness of fit between the author's interpretation and the original data. By following the processes outlined in this article, an overall ranking can be assigned to rate the confidence of synthesised qualitative findings, a system we have labelled ConQual.
The development and use of the ConQual approach will assist users of qualitative systematic reviews to establish confidence in the evidence produced in these types of reviews and can serve as a practical tool to assist in decision making.
定性研究综合分析得出的结果的重要性已日益得到认可。定性综合分析得出的结果本身就能为实践和政策问题提供信息，并且通常用于补充定量研究综合分析的结果。国际组织广泛采用GRADE方法对定量系统评价结果的质量和可信度进行评级。迄今为止，还没有一种被广泛接受的相应方法来帮助医疗保健专业人员和政策制定者对定性系统评价的综合结果建立信心。
成立了一个方法学小组，以制定一个评估定性研究综合结果可信度的流程，并为元聚合定性系统评价制定结果总结表。
可靠性和可信度是方法学小组认为会影响定性综合结果可信度的两个因素。提出了一组关键评价问题来确定可靠性，而可信度可根据作者的解释与原始数据之间的契合度进行排序。通过遵循本文所述的流程，可以给出一个总体排名来评定定性综合结果的可信度，我们将这个系统称为ConQual。
ConQual方法的开发和使用将帮助定性系统评价的使用者对这类评价所产生的证据建立信心，并可作为辅助决策的实用工具。
