Workshop on how to do a systematic review for evidence-based management.

Update: Here's a web page with info about this workshop.

At the Academy of Management annual meeting next month, there will be a professional development workshop discussing evidence-based management and research synthesis. The session will be chaired
by Denise Rousseau (who heads up the Evidence-Based Management Collaborative I've written about before). The workshop is "motivated by a concern that scholars and end users often fail to make full and effective use of relevant evidence."

Details are listed below. (I received this from an evidence-based management list-serv -- you can subscribe to it here. For the life of me, I can't find the professional development workshops listed on the conference web site -- I can't even find a program agenda, other than this overview.)

Friday, Aug 7, 2009 | 1:30-3:30pm | Session #79: Systematic Review and Research Synthesis | Sheraton Chicago (Arkansas Room)

The PDW is designed to demonstrate "how systematic reviews and research syntheses inform research, policy and practice. Systematic review has emerged in numerous disciplines and professions, notably medicine, health care, social care, education, and criminal justice, as the essential methodology for bridging the research-practice gap. It helps prepare participants for utilization, how to make use of systematic reviews and syntheses to inform research, policy and practice. This is a product of the AoM Evidence-based Management network. It inaugurates our effort to promote use of a fit-for-purpose systematic review methodology for management and organization studies. The complicated state of management research makes it tough to know what we know, especially as specialization spawns fragmentation."

Workshop Goals

• Demonstrate how to produce a systematic review and research synthesis in a fragmented field, like management research, that is pluralistic in both theory and method.
• Present different approaches to research synthesis including aggregative, interpretative, explanatory and integrative approaches. (see Rousseau, Manning, and Denyer, 2008)
• Model appropriate systematic review processes for management and organization studies and criteria for choosing among alternatives
• Show how systematic reviews and research syntheses can inform research, policy and practice.
• Present ways in which systematic reviews and research syntheses can be disseminated through web-based technologies.

Workshop Format

Part One: Overview of the principles and stages of a systematic review: question formulation, literature gathering, literature selection, literature appraisal, data extraction, interrogating the literature. Examples from various management fields will illustrate the approach.

Part Two: Approaches to synthesis. Examples of quantitative (meta-analysis), qualitative and realist approaches to synthesis will be provided. Each of the phases of synthesis will be demonstrated with the opportunity for participants to discuss and critically appraise each of the approaches.

Part Three: Group Discussion. Key issues of methodology, synthesis and utilization will be explored.