Use of Systematic Review Terminology and Methodological Quality in Children’s Social Care

ABSTRACT

Purpose: What Works for Children’s Social Care has developed an “Evidence Store” to improve awareness of evidence from systematic reviews in children’s social care. During review selection, some reviews were excluded due to methodological flaws, which this paper considers.

Methods: Reviews were identified using a systematic search and screening process. Where reviews were identified as systematic reviews or meta-analyses, exclusion reasons were recorded and analyzed.

Results: The main methodological issue related to quality assessment, which was not conducted in the majority of cases. Several different types of quality assessment tools were used: scales, checklists, and domain-based approaches.

Conclusions: This is the first study to examine the use of systematic review terminology in combination with the use of quality assessment tools in reviews in children’s social care. Consideration of appropriate systematic review methods will enable researchers to generate high-quality evidence and support delivery of evidence-based care.

KEYWORDS:

• Methodology
• quality assessment
• critical appraisal
• social work
• child welfare

Declaration of Interest Statement

We have no known conflicts of interest to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Department for Education, England, UK under Grant 41070002828.