Iranian Journal of

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The popularity of qualitative research in the health sciences is steadily increasing. However individual qualitative research, alone, is unable to provide a comprehensive and broad understanding of the phenomenon under study. This may be the reason why the results of these studies are uncommonly used by health policy makers. Meta-synthesis is a method in which the results of a body of qualitative research are aggregated in order to produce a new and comprehensive interpretation of the studied phenomenon, in such a way that the final result still represents and includes the findings of the original studies. The lack of a comprehensive article in Farsi language in this field, encouraged the authors to write this paper to introduce this method and explain some of its essential components to familiarize health professionals, including researchers and students, with meta-synthesis. In this article, the following components of meta-synthesis are described: the definition, the necessity and the how-to of meta-synthesis a determining research question, the selection and analysis of the original studies, and lastly, meta-synthesis conductors.

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  Background and Objectives : I In the classification proposed by Holmes and colleague, the stress of divorce has been identified as the greatest one among all types of stresses in the world. This global stress is on the rise in Iran so that Iran is the fourth country in this regard. The purpose of this study was to present a comprehensive and systematic model of the factors affecting divorce in the country.

 Methods: The method used in this study was qualitative and a type of meta-study known as meta-synthesis. The study population consisted of all relevant papers with research topics. In order to perform the research, after designing research questions, a systematic search was carried out based on relevant key words (divorce, spousal conflict, separation) from the databases Science Direct, IEEE, Emerald, ISC, IRANDOC, SID, Civilica, Scopus and also Google Scholar between 1365 to early 1392 .

  Results : By reviewing 61 articles out of 8477 primary ones, both foreign and domestic, researchers identified 15 dimensions and 64 components as the factors affecting divorce. Based on these factors, the final integrated model was presented and validated.

  Conclusion: The results of this study can be used as a basis for planning pre-marriage counseling programs by identifying factors affecting divorce on the basis of all available resources in the years 1365 to 1392.

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Background and Objectives: In 1995, a huge revolution occurred in Iran’s health system when the entire medical-related educa-tion program was integrated into the Ministry of Health. This paper was conducted to provide a review of all studies investigating this integration and to synthesize their results.
Methods: This study was a systematic review and qualitative meta-synthesis of the papers on integration using the Walsh and Downe process. An extensive search of the databases of ScienceDirect, PubMed, EMBASE, ISI, Google Scholar, Scopus, SID, Magiran, and Irandoc revealed 187 articles of which 25 were selected. The content of the studies was analyzed and combined using the Walsh and Downe technique.
Results: The results showed 5 main concepts, including the goals and reasons of the medical education integration, integration achievements, challenges, and barriers to achieving the goals of integration, and the future of integration. The greatest success of the integration program was related to health services, while the least positive effects were related to medical education and research.
Conclusion: A review of available documents shows that not all dimensions of integration have been well analyzed and their economic, social, developmental and scientific effects have not been studied. The majority of the limited studies in this regard were surveys and overview studies and few studies used economic analysis and modeling. Therefore, the effects of the integration cannot be evaluated using the available studies.