The Impact of Protection Interventions on Unaccompanied and Separated Children in Humanitarian Crises

Making and justifying evidence claims: evidence synthesis of impact evaluations and systematic reviews in international development

“…'The triangulation of findings from different research methods allowed us to define and test hypotheses using different methodologies that informed and supplemented each other.' (Stone et al, 2020) The choice of synthesis approach varied between more aggregative methods, such as meta-analysis (Akparibo et al, 2017;Alampay et al, 2017), and more configurative methods, such as narrative synthesis (Maynard et al, 2017;Williamson et al, 2017), framework analysis (Hossain et al, 2017b, Nair et al, 2017b, textual narration (Kumar et al, 2018), or a combination of the two (Babu et al, 2017). Most often, the authors explained that their decision was dictated by the nature of studies included for synthesis.…”

“…Others, such as Ghose et al (2017) and Hossain et al (2017b), referred to the impossibility of conducting an aggregative synthesis in the absence of suitable studies, opting for a configurative approach instead. Another reason provided for this decision was the heterogeneity of the included studies (Ali et al, 2017;Kumar et al, 2018;Maynard et al, 2017;Williamson et al, 2017). One of the authors made the following explicit acknowledgement to support their methodological choice: 'to differentiate heterogeneity of data between the studies, the textual narration method was adopted, which helped in bringing more clarity to the study contexts' (Ali et al, 2017).…”

“…Seven reviews reported inconclusive findings, with the authors describing the body of evidence as 'mixed, with few significant outcomes' (Hossain, 2017a, p. 2). Others justified the inconclusive findings because of the strength of evidence, which was limited (Akparibo et al, 2017), and the inconsistency of the findings across the included studies (Williamson et al, 2017). Four studies reported non-statistically significant findings, where the body of evidence was described as insufficient or limited (Ilavarasan et al, 2017b;Kumar et al, 2018;Stone et al, 2020).…”

Prioritizing the Prevention of Child-Family Separation: The Value of a Public Health Approach to Measurement and Action

“…Between 1970 and 1984, roughly 22,000 unaccompanied Vietnamese children fled the conflict to neighbouring countries [21]. The 1994 Rwandan genocide separated over 100,000 children from their families in Rwanda and neighbouring countries [22,23]. According to Eurostat (2018), 284,445 unaccompanied minors sought refuge in European Union countries between 2008 and 2017.…”

Being an unaccompanied- a dilemma for policy? Representations of unaccompanied teenagers in Norwegian policy

“…Nadine observes that research on unaccompanied teenagers seems to either dwell on statistical data drawn from representative samples, with a control group and data sets (2014). Equally, Williamson et al, (2017) argue that the pressure of time, financial constraints often lead researchers on short notice to generate representative data that is scientifically valid and justifiable. Due to this, the results established remain in the control of a few lobby and interest groups that seek to address the symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself.…”