Judgment, Resources, and Complexity: A Qualitative Study of the Experiences of Systematic Reviewers of Health Promotion

Systematic reviews play an increasingly important role in decision making in health promotion and public health. However, little has been published on how systematic reviewers acquire necessary knowledge and skills, and on the challenges they face in producing reviews. Semistructured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 17 systematic reviewers of health promotion. They described practice, training, and mentoring as being key ways that they learned reviewing skills, often in combination. Practice-based learning was considered to be particularly beneficial. Training was generally easy to access, though questions were raised about the feasibility of training stakeholders such as health professionals to become reviewers. It was suggested that an understanding of research methods is beneficial for novice reviewers. While funding opportunities for doing reviews are available, long-term investment is needed to support an infrastructure for the production of high-quality systematic reviews of important health promotion priorities.