Meta-Ethnography, a Method for the Synthesis of Qualitative Research: A Narrative Review

Background: Synthesis studies are used for the retrieval, review, synthesis, analysis, and integration of the findings of original studies. The purpose of this review was to shed more light on how meta-ethnography works as a method of inductive and interpretative knowledge synthesis, and on its application and implementation in medical sciences.Methods: This was a narrative review study and the statistical population included all scholarly publications on the synthesis of qualitative studies and meta-ethnography published from ۱۹۹۸ to ۲۰۲۲. The search in international and domestic databases led to the extraction of ۱۱۸ books and articles. After reviewing the titles, abstracts, and full texts of these publications, we included ۲ books and ۸ articles in the review.Results: Meta-ethnography is used for synthesizing the knowledge obtained from qualitative studies to re-conceptualize their findings. There are seven phases in the process of meta-ethnography: Getting started; Deciding on what is of initial interest; Reading the studies; Determining how the studies are related; Translating the studies to each other; Synthesizing the translations; and expressing the synthesis. The number of studies required to perform meta-ethnography has been recently suggested to be ۴۰. Strategies for updating meta-ethnography include repeating the previous strategy and reformulating the strategy according to a new objective, a revised review question, or new inclusion criteria.Conclusion: Noblit and Hare introduced meta-ethnography in ۱۹۸۸ as a qualitative research method for the synthesis of educational ethnographies. Today, it is widely used in healthcare research.

Keywords:

Meta-ethnography , qualitative research , Synthesis , Narrative review , interpretation