Main navigation

REA Toolkit

How to do an REA

Impact questions

Reviewing methods are most developed for “What Works?” questions: for example, ‘Do Teen Courts reduce rates of juvenile re-offending’? Methods for finding, coding, quality appraising and synthesising such studies are well developed and available ‘off the shelf’ for you to use. If you want to ask an impact question follow the links in this Toolkit to access these resources.

PICO

The first stage is to think through the question that you want to ask. One method for doing this is to use the PICO acronym:  

Is an REA suitable

Methods for undertaking REAs are most developed for impact questions but an REA may still not be suitable for your specific impact question.

Answering impact questions through an REA relies on finding studies that have:

If these types of studies do not exist in the area that you are interested in the findings from the REA are likely to be inconclusive.

The narrower the question (for example, in terms of how specific the population or intervention is defined) the more you may limit the available evidence. However, there is a trade off to be made because making your question broader is likely to take up more resources.

Formulating the REA question index