Choosing Outcome Measures in Systematic Reviews: Critical Challenges

Abstract

There are a number of challenges facing those who set out to conduct systematic reviews of intervention effects in the social sciences. These challenges include formulation of a review problem, gathering data about relevant studies and outcomes, analyzing that data, and interpreting the results. The first challenge, formulating a workable review problem, includes three subchallenges: delimiting interventions, specifying the intervention targets including problems and populations, and choosing outcome measures. This article examines the challenge of how to choose outcome measures.