Project team: Dr Marcello Bertotti (Principal Investigator), Farah Jamal, Professor Angela Harden, Kevin Sheridan, Gail Barrow-Guevara, Lori Atim
Start date: 01 March 2011
End date: 31 October 2011
Project funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council
Background
The ‘Connected Communities’ research programme led by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) has awarded a research grant to the Institute of Health and Human Development (IHHD) to investigate the meanings of community within and across research disciplines by adopting an innovative methodology based on a meta-narrative systematic review approach.
Policy and academic interest in the concept of ‘community’ is longstanding and such interest has become central to policy making in the last two decades. The notion of community is, however, a slippery concept. There is great diversity in the meaning of ‘communities’ which is very rarely explicitly acknowledged, harnessed or studied. In order to shed light on the various conceptualisations and meanings of community across disciplines, over time, and within different cultures and contexts, we will apply a meta-narrative review approach. A meta-narrative review (Greenhalgh et al, 2005) is a type of ‘systematic’ review rather than a traditional expert driven literature review and will ensure a rigorous, explicit and novel treatment of the literature. It is a new review method that has been developed as a systematic way to synthesise diverse types of literature with a focus on identifying the ‘storylines of research’ within and across disciplinary boundaries. This approach will enable us to systematically review research and theoretical work within and across disciplines distilling not just the similarities and differences of perspectives within each tradition (e.g. sociology, psychology, health, geography) but also across these, identifying key dimensions of communities common to each tradition and analyse how these compare. It will enable us to identify the meta-narratives of each discipline and to analyse the different ‘discourses’ and languages of ‘community’.
Aims
“How have ‘communities’ been conceptualised, evolved and treated in research within and across research traditions?”
Methods
We will conduct a systematic review based on a meta-narrative review approach (Greenhalgh et al, 2005). This is a type of ‘systematic’ review rather than a traditional expert driven literature review and will ensure a rigorous, explicit and novel treatment of the literature. It is a new review method that has been developed as a systematic way to synthesise diverse types of literature with a focus on identifying the ‘storylines of research’ within and across disciplinary boundaries. This approach will enable us to systematically review research and theoretical work within and across disciplines distilling not just the similarities and differences of perspectives within each tradition (e.g. sociology, psychology, health, geography) but also across these, identifying key dimensions of communities common to each tradition and analyse how these compare. It will enable us to identify meta-narratives of each discipline and to analyse the different ‘discourses’ and languages of ‘community’.
We have been invited to join a ‘community of practice’ of researchers taking a meta-narrative or realist approach to reviewing by the developer of the meta-narrative review, Professor Trisha Greenhalgh. This community of practice is being set up as part of funding (subject to contract) she has received from the NIHR Service Delivery and Organisation programme to meet the challenges of these new approaches to reviewing
Summary of phases in the meta-narrative review
For further information please contact: Marcello Bertotti
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