The role of qualitative research within an evidence-based context: can metasynthesis be the answer?

The increasing emphasis on evidence in the health care planning and policy context has fuelled considerable discussion and debate in nursing circles on the appropriate place of the less favourably placed knowledge forms within the conventional evidentiary hierarchy. In this paper, nursing's affinity for qualitative methods, and the species of knowledge they generate, are considered within the context of this evolving evidence-based practice movement. Noting conceptual and terminological confusions around the notion of evidence such as have arisen within the nursing literature, the author argues for clarity in our collective thinking about the role of research in a nursing or any other applied practice discipline. Toward this end, she points to some of the newer approaches to research synthesis and integration that may hold particular promise for enhancing our confidence about what might properly constitute a qualitatively-derived evidentiary knowledge claim. Such approaches may assist nurses to work more comfortably within the evidence-based movement, assured that reliance upon scientifically sound reference points need not compromise the complexity, richness and diversity they recognize as inherent in practice context excellence.