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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Evaluating evidence and making judgements of study quality
— loss of evidence and risks to policy and practice decisions | | Author(s) | David G White |
| Journal title | Critical Public Health, vol 11, no 1, 2001 |
| Pages | pp 3-18 |
| Keywords | Health [elderly] ; Preventative medicine ; Evaluation ; Quality ; Social policy. |
| Annotation | Attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of health promotion interventions require judgements to be made about the quality of the available evidence. While recognizing the need to evaluate the quality of evidence, this paper argues that conclusions about effectiveness are made on the basis of too little information with too much evidence discarded. A brief review of 88 health promotion systematic reviews showing large swathes of the available evidence failing to feature in reviews supports this argument. However, there is a lack of consistency in criteria used to make decisions as to acceptability of evidence. Furthermore, no external basis exists for validating decisions. Three approaches to evaluating evidence are considered, which result in different decisions being made about individual studies. Evaluation of evidence cannot be reduced to adherence to a set of simple rules: the process requires judgement and balancing of a number of different considerations. Furthermore, evaluations of programme effectiveness should be based on a consideration of all of the available evidence, and not just on a selected sub-set of studies. (KJ/RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-010514203 A |
| Classmark | CC: LK2: 4C: 59: TM2 |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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