Hello everyone! I'm developing, in my PhD, an intervention for parents during the postpartum period. Is it feasible and viable to develop a systematic review in a recent theme/area? I made a search on databases and, in the end, there is no more than 5 articles fitting the criteria. At the beggining maybe there are about 300/400 published articles in the area. Most of studies were conducted in 2019. Is it viable to invest in this systematic and rigorous work? It would be useful to profoundly analyse those 5 articles, because they could help me develop my own intervention.. So, i don't know what to do. Thank you very much.
Hi Daniela,
I think this depends on a few factors. If these studies are so similar that you don't need to include any moderators, and if their sample size is decent with respect to the investigated effect, then you might have enough data to draw some conclusions in a meta-analysis/systematic review. If there is methodological heterogeneity between these five studies, and samples are small, then I would perhaps opt for a critical methodological review.
Jan
In fact, the methodologies are different, there are one RCT, one quasi-experimental study and 4 non-experimental, with different samples (ranging from 13 to 50 parents per group). My interest will be in the characteristics of the interventions and the strategies used. But the area on mindful parenting is really recent, and there are no more than these studies. I really appreciate your answer. Thank you!
Daniela
As long as you are looking to synthesis evidence from primary research then a review is the best way forward, irrespective of the number of eligible papers.
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Linguistics
- Composition Studies
- Publisher