Novel methods of qualitative analysis for health policy research

Mireya Martínez-García,Maite Vallejo,Enrique Hernández-Lemus,Jorge Alberto Álvarez-Díaz

doi:10.1186/s12961-018-0404-z

Abstract

BackgroundCurrently, thanks to the growing number of public database resources, most evidence on planning and management, healthcare institutions, policies and practices is becoming available to everyone. However, one of the limitations for the advancement of data and literature-driven research has been the lack of flexibility of the methodological resources used in qualitative research. There is a need to incorporate friendly, cheaper and faster tools for the systematic, unbiased analysis of large data corpora, in particular regarding the qualitative aspects of the information (often overlooked).MethodsThis article proposes a series of novel techniques, exemplified by the case of the role of Institutional Committees of Bioethics to (1) massively identify the documents relevant to a given issue, (2) extract the fundamental content, focusing on qualitative analysis, (3) synthesize the findings in the published literature, (4) categorize and visualize the evidence, and (5) analyse and report the results.ResultsA critical study of the institutional role of public health policies and practices in Institutional Committees of Bioethics was used as an example application of the method. Interactive strategies were helpful to define and conceptualise variables, propose research questions and refine research interpretation. These methods are additional aids to systematic reviews, pre-coding schemes and construction of a priori diagrams to survey and analyse social science literature.ConclusionsThese novel methods have proven to facilitate the formulation and testing of hypotheses on the subjects to be studied. Such tools may allow important advances going from descriptive approaches to decision-making and even institutional assessment and policy redesign, by pragmatic reason of time and costs.

Highlights

Thanks to the growing number of public database resources, most evidence on planning and management, healthcare institutions, policies and practices is becoming available to everyone
Computerized Qualitative Analysis of Discourse (CQAD) and non-systematic literature reviews (NSLR) have some degree of empirical support and classifying evidence of their epistemological strength; both converge in the analytic phase, sharing methodologies for decontextualising and recontextualising data, coding, sorting, identifying themes and relationships, and drawing conclusions [2]
The documents were retrieved in plain text format, a corpus with 770 records was formed, after removing the duplicates (n = 393), each one of these constituted, among other elements, an identifier of the Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE) (PubMed) database (PMID), title, summary, date of publication, name and place of ascription of the authors, as well as the country where the research work took place

Summary

Introduction

Thanks to the growing number of public database resources, most evidence on planning and management, healthcare institutions, policies and practices is becoming available to everyone. There are several ways to perform qualitative analysis of Health Care Institutions Policies and Practices (HCIPP), including ethnography, ethnomethodology, phenomenology, action research, grounded theory, critical discourse analysis, and. CQAD and NSLR have some degree of empirical support and classifying evidence of their epistemological strength; both converge in the analytic phase, sharing methodologies for decontextualising and recontextualising data, coding, sorting, identifying themes and relationships, and drawing conclusions [2]. At this stage, it is useful to assess the strengths and limitations of current approaches to policy analysis and to address how improvement can be achieved in this regard

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Conclusion