Welcome back to Section C, examples of qualitative synthesis. In this section, I'm actually not going to talk much, but I'm going to steer you in the direction of where we've put some examples up of qualitative synthesis. Some of these examples come from people who were in past classes. They've given us permission to put up the qualitative synthesis so that you can learn more about what might be included. This first example, which is from a systematic review on abstinence-plus programs for HIV infection in high-income countries, has a couple of sections that might be interesting to you. The first is the description of studies and what they found, their methodological quality, and then they have tables where they described the characteristics of the included studies, as you can see here. This review actually doesn't have much in the way of qualitative synthesis. And I think I've mentioned that Cochrane reviews put the qualitative synthesis in the discussion section, which I don't happen to agree with. I think it deserves its own section as part of the results. The next systematic review is done by a group that took this class a number of years ago, and they looked at that form and use in polycystic ovary. They did a systematic review that included these tables on the studies that were included, each of the studies that were included and the subgroups that they included. They also looked at other meta-analyses and which studies those meta-analyses included. And as you can see from this slide, they included all different studies, which is what I was talking about in one of the early slides in Section A, I believe. And that is that different systematic reviews on the same topic may include entirely different studies with some overlap. But you can see there is no study that I can see, that it's in all the systematic reviews which is very interesting. The one here, Creanga, that's highlighted is the one by the former members of this class. This is from a systematic review from another former class member looking at school-based intervention. And they talk about allocation, and how this method of allocation may have affected the outcomes of the study itself. And that's part of a qualitative synthesis. Here's another example of how publication year might have influenced the outcomes of a systematic review of treatment for latent TB infection. This group also examined the interventions and outcomes in each of the studies and also in the systematic review as a whole. And showed how the differences in these interventions may or may not have affected the efficacy of therapy, and may also have affected what was ascertained to be treatment-related side effects. I'm not going to go through the rest of the slides. I'm going to leave them for you. This is the reason that if I were go through them, I would be reading every word because this is what's written in the write up of the systematic review that past students have done. And I don't want to just read the slides, I'll leave that to you. But these are some good examples of how, in past years, students have used information from their systematic review to enrich their qualitative synthesis. So do look at the slides. I'm not going to go through them. But they're there for you to look at. And examples, that is the full example that these were taking from, are up on CoursePlus. I'm going to conclude by saying that I encourage you to look at examples. I encourage you to look at any systematic review you can get your hands on, for how they might have done the qualitative synthesis. Because this is sort of a vague area. There is no right and wrong. However, you definitely need a qualitative synthesis in your systematic review and we're going to look for it when we do the grading of your papers. So I can't emphasize enough how important it is that you include this. We consider the most important part of a systematic review and encourage you to find a way to use thinking about and interpreting what you find in the write up of your systematic review. So that's all in this lecture about qualitative synthesis and I look forward to seeing you next time. [MUSIC]
