Did we describe what you meant? Findings and methodological discussion of an empirical validation study for a systematic review of reasons

BMC Medical Ethics

Daniel Strech¹  Neema Sofaer²  Marcel Mertz¹ 

[1] Institute for History, Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Hannover Medical School, Carl-Neuberg-Str. 1, D-30625 Hannover, Germany;Centre of Medical Law & Ethics, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK

关键词: Post-trial access;    Empirical ethics;    Bioethics;    Medical ethics;    Methodology;    Systematic review;    Systematic review of reason;   

Others  :  1090060
DOI  :  10.1186/1472-6939-15-69

 received in 2014-05-05, accepted in 2014-09-22,  发布年份 2014

【 摘 要 】

Background

The systematic review of reasons is a new way to obtain comprehensive information about specific ethical topics. One such review was carried out for the question of why post-trial access to trial drugs should or need not be provided. The objective of this study was to empirically validate this review using an author check method. The article also reports on methodological challenges faced by our study.

Methods

We emailed a questionnaire to the 64 corresponding authors of those papers that were assessed in the review of reasons on post-trial access. The questionnaire consisted of all quotations (“reason mentions”) that were identified by the review to represent a reason in a given author’s publication, together with a set of codings for the quotations. The authors were asked to rate the correctness of the codings.

Results

We received 19 responses, from which only 13 were completed questionnaires. In total, 98 quotations and their related codes in the 13 questionnaires were checked by the addressees. For 77 quotations (79%), all codings were deemed correct, for 21 quotations (21%), some codings were deemed to need correction. Most corrections were minor and did not imply a complete misunderstanding of the citation.

Conclusions

This first attempt to validate a review of reasons leads to four crucial methodological questions relevant to the future conduct of such validation studies: 1) How can a description of a reason be deemed incorrect? 2) Do the limited findings of this author check study enable us to determine whether the core results of the analysed SRR are valid? 3) Why did the majority of surveyed authors refrain from commenting on our understanding of their reasoning? 4) How can the method for validating reviews of reasons be improved?

【 授权许可】

   
2014 Mertz et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.

【 图 表 】

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