- Title
- Exploring the pragmatic and explanatory study design on outcomes of systematic reviews of public health interventions: a case study on obesity prevention trials
- Creator
- Yoong, Sze Lin; Wolfenden, Luke; Clinton-McHarg, Tara; Waters, Elizabeth; Pettman, Tahna L.; Steele, Emily; Wiggers, John
- Relation
- NHMRC
- Relation
- Journal of Public Health Vol. 36, Issue 1, p. 170-176
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdu006
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- Intervention research provides information regarding the potential health impacts of public health initiatives and is critical to guide evidence-informed public health decision-making and practice. According to translation models of research, testing of public health interventions should first occur under ‘ideal’ controlled conditions to maximize internal validity; increase confidence that intervention effects are attributable to the intervention and aid an understanding of casual relationships between the intervention and outcome assessed. Such studies are known as ‘explanatory’ or ‘efficacy’ trials and are usually characterized by restrictive sample selection, intervention delivery by experts and inflexible intervention protocols. If found to be effective, these interventions should next be tested under ‘real world’ conditions to assess the likely impact of an intervention if it was implemented in the community.1 These studies are known as ‘pragmatic’ or ‘effectiveness’ trials and have less restrictive sample selection procedures, flexible intervention delivery approaches and a greater focus on external validity. Consideration of whether studies are explanatory or pragmatic in their design may be particularly useful when synthesizing the impact of public health intervention trials as part of systematic reviews. Given the wide variation in study methodology, the characteristics that distinguish between explanatory and pragmatic trials are likely to influence both statistical heterogeneity and intervention effect estimates in meta-analysis. As systematic reviews of public health trials often report high heterogeneity, pooling data from trials grouped according to their explanatory or pragmatic design may increase confidence in the results obtained from meta-analyses.
- Subject
- systematic reviews; public health interventions; case study; obesity prevention
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1320541
- Identifier
- uon:24170
- Identifier
- ISSN:1741-3850
- Language
- eng
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