Читать книгу Practitioner's Guide to Using Research for Evidence-Informed Practice - Allen Rubin - Страница 35

Before you start searching for evidence, you need to know what question you are trying to answer. Chapter 1 describes six common types of EIP questions. One of the most common of the six questions pertains to ascertaining which interventions, programs, or policies have the best evidence supporting their effectiveness.

Suppose, for example, that you are planning to establish a residential treatment facility for physically or sexually abused girls who have emotional or behavioral problems, and you need to decide which treatment modalities to employ. Your EIP question might inquire as to which treatment modalities have the best evidence supporting their effectiveness with girls who share the projected characteristics of your clients. Alternatively, you might have reason in advance to suspect that one or more particular modalities will be most effective based on what you have read or heard about it from a theoretical standpoint. For example, colleagues involved in a similar program elsewhere might rave about the great success they've experienced using eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). Colleagues in another program might claim to have had little success with EMDR and much more success with exposure therapy. Perhaps you've read clinical books on both modalities, and both look equally promising to you from a clinical standpoint. Consequently, instead of asking a broader question about the effectiveness of the gamut of possible treatment modalities, you might narrow your search to the question of whether EMDR or exposure therapy is more effective with the types of clients you plan to treat.

A tool that you might choose to use to construct your question about effectiveness or about which assessment tool to use is the PICO (patient/population, intervention, comparison and outcomes) framework. PICO questions include four parts, which are represented by the four letters in the acronym, as illustrated in Table 2.1. Writing a question using this PICO framework can help you clearly articulate your question and help you to develop search terms that capture each of these important elements.

Before you begin to search the evidence, it can be helpful to lay out your question – whether you are using a PICO framework or not – so that you can think about the key search terms that you could use before you are in the thick of the search. Especially helpful is to think about synonyms that represent the same key concepts in your question. For example, different studies might refer to children aged 12–16 as children, youth, or young adolescents. If you don't think about these synonyms, you may miss studies that just use different language to mean the exact same thing.