Systematic reviews of qualitative evidence for environmental policy and management: an overview of different methodological options

Table 1 Selected QES approaches [16, 42, 43, 67, 89]

Approach	Epistemology	Purpose/research problem	Type of evidence	Review question	Sampling^a	Key readings
Framework synthesis	Realist	Adapts and/or develops a pre-existing theoretical framework	Qualitative/mixed	Fixed	Comprehensive	Oliver et al. [51], Brunton et al. [90]
Thematic synthesis	Realist/Idealist	Develops new explanatory theories and/or conceptualisations	Qualitative	Fixed	Comprehensive	Thomas and Harden [56]
Meta-ethnography	Idealist	Develops new explanatory theories and/or conceptualisations	Qualitative	Emerging	Purposive	Noblit and Hare [59], Britten et al. [60]
Critical interpretive synthesis	Idealist	Develops new explanatory theories and/or conceptualisations	Qualitative/quantitative/mixed	Fixed	Purposive	Dixon-Woods et al. [64]
Realist synthesis	Realist	Explores the mechanisms which cause interventions to result in specific outcomes in specified contexts	Qualitative/quantitative/mixed	Fixed	Purposive	Pawson [69]

^aBecause of the prevalent risk-of-bias discourse in the 'evidence-based movement', reviewers have been more inclined to work with comprehensive samples to avoid selection bias, although this is not so relevant for QES [69]. As a result, there are examples of meta-ethnographies that adopted comprehensive sampling approach

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