Scoping Reviews in Group Analysis What are they? Why and How to do them
Recently, I stumbled across a scoping review of the therapeutic alliance in text-based psychotherapy. If you’re curious what a scoping review is, well, the word ‘scope’ is derived from the Greek noun ‘σκοπός’. Scope refers to the range of a topic. A scoping review aims to map evidence of psychotherapeutic interventions, for example. So when you’d like to assess, or investigate, to what extent group analysis has been an efficient therapy for psychosomatic disturbance, you could do a scoping review of the literature. This involves that you ‘scope’ body and mind group analytic articles. But that’s not all.
The purpose of scoping reviews is to synthesize evidence. How? By identifying and systematically mapping the available group analytic evidence regarding something, in our case, psychosomatic disorders. This method is structured and provides a general overview of the literature. Hence, it enables you to identify missing evidence and knowledge gaps. While it’s comparable to carrying out a systematic review, there are methodological differences between scoping and systematic reviews. And your rationale differs. A scoping review is performed when emerging evidence exists. Therefore, in contrast to a systematic review, it’s not the pillar of the evidence base. Why not? Because you don’t have sufficient evidence. Moreover, you can include opinions of experts, relevant policy documents, and qualitative and quantitative studies in a scoping review, regardless of their quality.
Scoping reviews are ideal when you want to determine the breadth of the existing empirical literature. In the case of psychosomatic disturbance, your goal could be to gain a broad overview of the studies that have examined body-mind connections. Or to ascertain what kind of proof has been gathered. Possibly, you’d like to find out how reliable and valid this evidence is. However, in contrast to systematic reviews, you don’t have to appraise the included literature in-depth when you do a scoping review.
Confused about the two types of review? Let me explain further. Consider how much evidence already exists. CBT is based on many methodologically robust outcome studies. So in order to answer the question “Does CBT improve depression in adults?”, you would carry out a systematic review. Numerous studies have examined the effect of cognitive behavioural therapy on depression and shown that CBT works. In other word, the evidence is not emergent. Hence, you assess how good this evidence is. To strengthen the evidence base, you could systematically review the empirical literature.
When you want to explore group analytic evidence for psychosomatic problems, a systematic review would not be appropriate. Do a scoping review instead. If you haven’t got a clue how to conduct a review, look at the website of the Joanna Briggs Institute. Guidance on how to perform scoping reviews has been developed by these researchers. There you’ll find the PRISMAR-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews). It’s a checklist which guides you through the process of conducting a scoping review. If you’re interested in doing such review on group analysis and you want to use the PRISMA-ScR, read Tricco et al.’s (2018) article. Checklist items are defined and examples are given.
Until you do, let’s consider this hypothetical case to give you an idea of how to perform a scoping review. You strongly believe that physical illness can be caused by the psyche. Therefore, you like to know what kind of group analytic evidence exists to treat psychosomatic difficulties. So you open books, search the internet and become wiser. After reading what is already known in the literature on the body-mind, you identify that little has been written about the experiences of group members with psychosomatic problems. Since you’re an inquisitive person, you want to find out more. That’s your rationale for performing a scoping review.
You explicitly state your review question and objective: “A scoping review will be performed to systematically map the experiential evidence for group analytic therapy in the field of psychosomatic disorders”.
Next you define specific eligibility criteria. You decide to include English articles from 1960 onwards that report on clients with psychosomatic problems. Not because you’re a fan of the English language or of the sexual revolution, but because more attention has been paid to psychosomatic illness since then, and most articles have been published in English.
Then you start your literature search. This component is fundamental, because it affects the overall quality of the evidence syntheses. If your search is not comprehensive and precise, you’ll miss records. Hence, it’s a good idea to jot down which databases you search, when you search them, and how many results your search yields. Your search strategy must be described in detail so that others can replicate your scoping review. Remember to include the date of your most recent literature search, if you search more than once. Otherwise, readers don’t know how current your included evidence is.
Should the prospect of searching the literature make you feel panicky, because you don’t like computers and databases, have a look at the Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies (McGowan et al., 2016). This checklist guides you through search techniques.
It’s good practice to search for grey literature. Scan through reference lists of articles and look at unpublished manuscripts to locate all available information. Sources should be reported when you’ll write up your review.
After you’ve completed your literature search, you select the evidence for your scoping review. Create a form that shows the data selection process. For example, after screening 478 titles and 278 abstracts, you read 163 entire articles.
Once you’ve found all literature for your review, you extract (chart) your data and summarize them. You could group quantitative studies together and identify how valid results are. If you do assess them, explain how you did it.
The AMSTAR (Shea et al., 2017) can be useful, because it measures the overall quality of studies (scores of 8 or higher is considered high quality, 4-7 moderate, and 0-3 low quality).
Even though it was originally developed to evaluate the methodological quality of randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in systematic reviews, you could use it when you include RCTs in your scoping review. Have a look at this website to download this checklist: https://amstar.ca/Amstar_Checklist.php.
Since you are a group animal, you conduct the scoping review with other group analysts. Say whether you screened articles independently and how disagreements were resolved. But don’t analyse unconscious dynamics and stick to objective accounts instead. Use either diagrams or narrative descriptions when detailing the data extraction process.
Then you analyze your data, which means that you synthesize your results. Various formats can be used to present your evidence (table, diagram, map or narrative). Obviously, the synthesis must be related to the question and aim of your review, so select only content that is relevant to answering what experiential evidence exists in group analysis for psychosomatic disturbance.
Finally, don’t project, but admit that your scoping review has limitations (e.g. several unpublished studies were included).
Here’s a brief recap of the steps you take when performing a scoping review: You develop research question(s), determine inclusion criteria, use a comprehensive search strategy, search databases, identify grey literature (dissertations, conference papers, reports), describe your search strategy, screen titles/abstracts according to your eligibility criteria, read full texts,assess the quality of the data/evidence if you wish, synthesize the data, and write your report. Great, isn’t it?
Now you can conduct not only groups, but also scoping reviews. That’ll keep you busy throughout the autumn.
References
McGowan, J, Sampson M and et al. (2016) PRESS Peer Review of Electronic Search Strategies: 2015 Guideline Statement. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology. 75:40-6.
Tricco AC, Lillie E, Zarin W, O’Brien KK, Colquhoun H, Levac D, et al. (2018) PRISMA Extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR): Checklist and Explanation. Annals of Internal Medicine. 169: 467–473. doi: 10.7326/M18-0850.
Shea, BJ, Reeves, BC, Wells G et al. (2017) AMSTAR 2: a critical appraisal tool for systematic reviews that include randomised or non-randomised studies of healthcare interventions, or both. British Medical Journal. 358-367. doi: 10.1136.