Assessing Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research – the CERQual tool

In addition to evidence on the effectiveness of a health intervention, decision makers, including guideline panel members, need robust evidence on the acceptability and feasibility of the intervention as well as on other factors that are likely to affect an intervention’s implementation and sustainability.

Qualitative research is especially valuable in exploring questions related to the acceptability and feasibility of an intervention as well as other implementation considerations. Methods for systematically reviewing the results of multiple qualitative primary research studies are an emerging area of research within the health sciences. However, as with evidence of effectiveness, decision makers need tools for assessing how much confidence they can place in findings from systematic reviews of qualitative evidence.

The CERQual (Confidence in the Evidence from Reviews of Qualitative research) tool provides a transparent method for assessing the confidence of evidence from reviews of qualitative research, and indicating this confidence to end users, such as guideline panels or decision makers. CERQual uses a similar approach conceptually to other GRADE tools, but is intended for findings from systematic reviews of qualitative evidence.
The development of CERQual is being taken forward through the CERQual subgroup of the GRADE Working Group. This subgroup is coordinated by Claire Glenton (Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services), Simon Lewin (Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services and Medical Research Council of South Africa) and Heather Menzies Munthe-Kaas (Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services).

To learn more about the CERQual tool, or to join the mailing list for the CERQual subgroup of the GRADE Working Group, please email: hmk@nokc.no

Examples of the use of an earlier version of CERQual in qualitative evidence syntheses include  Glenton et al. 2013, Colvin et al. 2012 and Bohren et al. 2014.