Sly Saint
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Metasynthesis is currently considered one of the most promising directions for qualitative research, as it can contribute to the generalizability of qualitative findings and increase their impact.
At the same time, single case studies gain attention in the field of psychotherapy research, as they offer unique insights into psychotherapy process and promote theory building. In the following, we will elaborate on a worked example of a metasynthesis of published psychotherapy case studies.
Thereby, we investigated the psychotherapeutic process in ten case studies of patients with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS), while focusing on the theoretical concepts of deficit and conflict. The reader will be guided through the dilemmas and choices in research design and data analysis.
First, the theory-building approach toward metasynthesis will be discussed. Then, a novel search engine, the Single Case Archive, will be introduced as an easy way to access and systematically search for psychotherapeutic case studies in a database with over 3000 cases.
Furthermore, we will share our experience of adapting data analysis procedures for the purpose of a metasynthesis of case studies.
As case studies describe the psychotherapy process in its complexity unfolding over time, they cannot be approached in the same manner as interview material, thus asking for methodological innovations.
Through the creation of timelines of therapeutic events, process-oriented themes could be detected that would not have been found when only using line-by-line coding. Finally, limitations of the metasynthesis are discussed.
This work was supported by the German National Academic Foundation and the Hercules Foundation; the authors declare no conflict of interest.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-65331-6_3
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