Determining the Relationship between Postnatal Depression and Peer Support

CHAPTER 4

4.1 Search Strategy
The main purpose of the study was to determine the relationship between postnatal depression and peer support by way of reviewing primary research articles. The search strategy adopted for this study can be broken down into several steps. The key concepts and terminologies for the study were identified. The synonyms of the terms were then determined which were also included within the search terms. Boolean operators were the chosen search features. Databases from which the literature search would be conducted were chosen. Using Boolean operators, different search expression were created and the search conducted. The results were evaluated and the inclusion exclusion criteria applied to get the articles that meet the inclusion criteria. The search terms and Boolean operators were modified and search conducted again and the results evaluated. This process was repeated across all the databases chosen for the study.
4.2 Search Terminologies
The PICO (Population, Intervention, Context, Outcome) framework was used to formulate the question and the search strategy (Glasziou Del Marc & Sailsbury, 2000). Keywords are useful to any study as they enable an investigator to conduct a search that is likely to yield results that are relevant to the study (Melnyk & Fineout-Overholt 2011). For this study the PICO framework is shown in the table below population Postnatal women
Intervention Peer Support
Context Relationship
Outcome Postnatal depression
Table 4.2.1: Table showing how the PICO framework was applied to the study
It is worth noting that the concepts and keywords identified had synonyms. These synonyms were used interchangeably by different authors. As such, there was need to incorporate the synonyms with...

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