Practice-based Research in (allied) healthcare

1.5 The five steps of evidence-based practice

is a choice that depends on your research question and the overall availability of relevant literature. Appraising literature Not all the information you find is equally valuable when trying to answer your research question. It can be difficult to assess the value of a study. However, doing so in a structured manner, reading the literature you find in its entirety and assessing it based on a number of aspects will already get you quite far. You can assess the articles you have selected by asking and answering five questions:

Five questions for appraising literature Validity and methodological quality 1 What is the aim of the study? 2 How was it conducted? 3 What are the study’s strengths and weaknesses?

Importance and relevance of the findings 4 What was found?

Applicability to your own context 5 How will it help me in practice?

When appraising the literature, you must first make sure whether the aim and research question are sufficiently clear (assessment question 1). What did the study concern? Does the research question sufficiently match what you are looking for? Do you expect to find useful information in the article? This will also help you answer the other questions. By searching the article for an answer to the question of how the study was conducted (assessment question 2), you will gain insight into whether the approach is described clearly enough and whether it is appropriate given the aim and research question. This tells you something about the validity of the study. Furthermore, you must consider the study’s strengths and weaknesses (assessment question 3). This is necessary in order to determine whether the conclusions that are drawn within the study are valid (i.e. whether the study has sufficient internal validity ).

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