The Proposed Research Method and Rationale
The proposed study will adopt a qualitative approach to researching, which is reported in extant literature as being advantageous over the quantitative method because it allows for a more comprehensive synthesis of information (Creswell & Creswell, 2017). Precisely, the study will systematize literature on the topic and report the findings in a systematic review. A systematic review has been chosen because it allows researchers to appraise a wide range of information that they would not have collected if they conducted a primary research (Mulrow, 2014). Secondly, conducting a secondary study saves the time and resources that would have been used in the collection of primary data.
Sources of Data
The proposed study will review literature published in journals of repute. Precisely, the researcher will search for information from online databases, which include EBSCO, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, PubMed/Medline, JSTOR, Scopus, LexisNexis, and Web of Science. In addition to the identified databases, the researcher will search for articles to include in the systematic review using the Google Scholar search engine. The researcher will also visit the university library to collect information from published books and periodicals that would contain information on the research topic. The author will also use humanitarian and professional websites, such as the World Health Organization, and the National Sexual Violence Report Center, to collect information that would be synthesized and incorporated into the systematic review.
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The Search Strategy
While conducting a systematic review, it is always important that researchers develop a search strategy that would lead them into including the relevant papers only (University of Tasmania, 2019). First, it would be important to formulate the research question, which would be useful in deducing the key terms. The study will use “what are the perceived barriers to reporting sexual assault in the US military?” as the research question for the proposed systematic review. The second step of the search strategy will be to develop the search terms that will be fed into the search engines of the databases and Google. For this case, the researcher will use sexual assault AND military as the search terms. The third step would be to filter the search findings with the objective of including only the most relevant publications. Consequently, while conducting the search for articles for inclusion, the study applied Boolean operators, especially for the PubMed/Medline database to ensure that only studies with specific characteristics were included into the systematic review as indicated subsequently.
Inclusion Criteria
Articles will be included by their relevance to the study question, which means that only those reporting barriers to reporting sexual assault in the military were included in the systematic review while those that investigated other aspects of sexual assault in the military were not included in the synthesis. Furthermore, only peer reviewed articles will included in the study. The third criterion for inclusion of studies in the proposed systematic review will be their ages. For this case, the study will include only studies published within the last two decades, starting from 2000 to present. The fourth criterion for inclusion of the studies will their designs, for which case the proposed literature review will incorporate only qualitative studies with the priority of randomized controlled trails and other useful designs. The systematic review will also include only studies that were published in English or those that have translations into English since the researcher’s lingual competencies are limited to the language. To focus the proposed study in the context of the US, it would be relevant to include only studies published in the US or those published abroad, but whose focus is on the US military.
References
Creswell, J. W., & Creswell, J. D. (2017). Research design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches . Sage publications.
Mulrow, C. D. (2014). Systematic reviews: rationale for systematic reviews. Bmj , 309 (6954), 597-599.
University of Tasmania (2019). Subject Guides: Systematic Reviews for Health: Building Search Strategies . Utas.libguides.com . Retrieved 15 March 2019, from http://utas.libguides.com/SystematicReviews/SearchStrategies
