Explain what question the researchers were trying to answer with this study and what their findings were. Discuss any criticisms of the research and any evidence that the research was duplicated in another study. Finally, summarize the results of the original study, and discuss at least one application or significant finding that resulted from the study.
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The synthesis of qualitative and quantitative research findings is increasingly promoted, but many of the conceptual and methodological issues it raises have yet to be fully understood and resolved. In this article, we describe how we handled issues encountered in efforts to synthesize the findings in forty-two reports of studies of antiretroviral adherence in HIV-positive women in the course of an ongoing study to develop methods to synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings in common domains of health-related research. Working with these reports underscored the importance of looking past method claims and ideals and directly at the findings themselves, differentiating between aggregative syntheses in which findings are assimilated and interpretive syntheses in which they are configured, and understanding the judgments involved in designating relationships between findings as confirmatory, divergent, or complementary.
Keywords: antiretroviral adherence, HIV/AIDS, qualitative research, quantitative research, research synthesis, systematic review, women
Influenced by the turn to evidence-based practice and renewed concerns to enhance the utilization value of academic and clinical research, scholars in the health and social sciences have shown a growing interest in conducting mixed research synthesis studies in which qualitative and quantitative research findings in shared domains of empirical research are integrated (e.g., Harden and Thomas 2005; Sandelowski, Voils, and Barroso 2006). Such studies are increasingly promoted, but many of the conceptual and methodological issues they raise have yet to be fully understood and resolved. In this article we discuss how we managed the issues we encountered while attempting to integrate a set of qualitative and quantitative findings in an ongoing study, the purpose of which is to develop methods to synthesize qualitative and quantitative research findings in common domains of health-related research.
THE MIXED RESEARCH SYNTHESIS PROJECT
We began this method project with studies of antiretroviral adherence conducted with HIV-positive women of any race/ethnicity, class, or nationality living in the United States. These delimitations were set to secure an initial sample methodologically diverse enough to permit but not so topically diverse as to preclude the methodological experimentation at the heart of the project. Reports of these studies were retrieved using all major channels of communication, primarily forty databases housing citations to literature across the health, behavioral, and social sciences. To accommodate the methodological objectives of the project, we chose a broad and inclusive direction for our synthesis efforts; that is, we were interested in empirical research findings—derived from HIV-positive women themselves—concerning their use of anti-retroviral therapy.
We retrieved forty-two reports (six unpublished master’s theses or doctoral dissertations and thirty-six peer-reviewed articles) meeting our search criteria between June 2005 and January 2006. (A list of these reports is available from the authors on request.) Of these forty-two reports, twenty-six are reports of quantitative observational studies, twelve of qualitative studies, three of intervention studies, and one of a mixed methods (qualitative descriptive and pilot intervention) study. From each report, we extracted information on research purpose, design, and methodology. None of these reports were excluded for reasons of quality, as the value of a report for any research synthesis can be determined only while conducting that synthesis