Meta-Ethnography

When several studies deal with the same topic, the researcher may want to analyze the relationship between them by carrying out a research synthesis. Meta-ethnography is an approach to research synthesis that is especially appropriate for qualitative studies. It is important to understand its history as a genre of research synthesis, how meta-ethnography maintains the fundamental assumptions of qualitative research, the types of syntheses possible, and what other qualitative approaches have been developed from meta-ethnography.

The growth of research in education and social and behavioral sciences in the 1960s and 1970s made research synthesis a key topic in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This interest was sparked by a range of developments including the reemergence of qualitative research methods, expansion of research funding, and a shift in universities to emphasize scholarship. As the volume of studies expanded, methodologies for synthesizing this research also developed. On the quantitative side, meta-analysis was developed. On the qualitative side, meta-ethnography was developed to avoid what was seen as the tendency of quantitative studies to simply add or aggregate results. In anthropology, there has been an ethnology tradition, but it [Page 508]was linked to a theoretical school that was in decline because of its inability to explain conflict. As the number of qualitative studies increased, the pressure was to say what this burgeoning scholarship was yielding.

George Noblit and Dwight Hare in their 1988 book, Meta-Ethnography: Synthesizing Qualitative Studies, argued for an approach that focused on engaging the theoretical or interpretative schemes each study employed. To avoid simple aggregation, they used a translation theory of explanation in which the metaphors or themes of each study would be translated into the terms of the other studies. The process then involved translating the set of metaphors or themes from each study into each other. Three types of synthesis were identified. A reciprocal translation is used when the studies seem to be addressing similar ideas. The synthesis task then is to either decide which set of metaphors can subsume other sets or develop a new set of metaphors that can account for all the studies involved. A refutational synthesis is appropriate when studies disagree on key points, and the synthesis task becomes specifying the nature of the refutation and its salience. A line of argument synthesis is when studies are not fully commensurate but speak to different aspects of a larger phenomenon. The synthesis task is to specify the larger phenomenon and how the various studies can be taken as a line of argument about the nature of the larger phenomena.

Meta-ethnography has led to a family of similar techniques including meta-study and meta-synthesis as well as grounded theory approaches. Each of these approaches has developed in response to a particular set of interests and all remain important. Meta-ethnography is being used in fields such as medicine, medical sociology, nursing, and education. This has been in part spawned by interests in evidence-based practice. However, this usage is controversial because it requires a theory of the relation of research to practice that is unspecified. Meta-ethnography has also been used to advance theory. Yet theory is used in different ways in different qualitative approaches, and the ramifications of this usage needs to be explored. Finally, history needs to be conceptualized as meta-ethnography is used to speak about studies over time.

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