Palacios A y García-Sánchez PC, “Propuesta de Análisis Metodológico y Crítico de la literatura científica en los Grados de CC de la Salud y Deporte”, 2013

Questionnaire grounds

The main target of the questionnaire is to provide a generic reading tool guide. Like any other reading guide, this instrument’s goal is to guide the reader in order to create an “accurate” and “useful” paper representation.  In other words, we can think of a published paper like a recipe already cooked and the goal of this questionnaire is helping the reader to figure out what ingredients the researchers used and how did they cook them in order to get the actual paper.

On the other side, this is not a checklist or quantitative reading guide or methodological quality questionnaires as PEDro scale… etc…  More precisely, this questionnaire has a different aim that those well-known instruments. As we said previously, this questionnaire has an educational/learning aim; this aim has led us to be much more extensive on the questions. In other words, our goal is to get the student/reader to know the papers

Questionnaire structure

This representation includes three main dimensions: Methodological analysis, Critical Reading and Evaluation, and Recommendations.  

1. Methodological analysis

The first step involved in this phase is building an accurate representation of the paper’s contents and structure. After doing this, the reader should be able to get an actual representation of the paper’s research design as a ground for possible clinical uses and criticisms.

2. Critical Reading

In this part, the reader has to develop a critical view of the paper. This view is supposed to be built from an outside perspective. Actually, it includes two points, a) relations and comparisons with the reader’s previous knowledge and b) future possible clinical applications of the paper. The critical dimension is defined when the reader has to justify its answer to the questions.

3. Evaluation and Recommendations

This part is about evaluating the quality of the information presented on the paper as well as establishing future guidelines or advice from the paper and to the paper. In other words, this is about paper’s usefulness for future professional practices and for future researches.

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