Part Two of a Data Collection Form:
Study Eligibility

Before we design this part of the data collection form we need to understand the process of selecting studies for you review. Skip to Module 8 and complete it, then return to this point to design Part 2 of your form.

To make decisions about including or excluding studies, as we discussed in Module 8, most people use some kind of eligibility form. These forms help you structure the way you go about judging whether a study is eligible for your review. They also help you to find out at a later date why you reached certain judgements.

You will find an example of an eligibility form here.

Study_eligibility.pdf

You'll see that it collects some information about the study ID (useful in case the form later gets detached from the study report), and then asks a series of questions about the study design, participants, interventions and outcomes. These will come directly from the inclusion criteria you set up earlier and will be a way of seeing if each study matches your criteria.

Try to design an eligibility form for your review. Use the table you generated in Module 5 as your guide.

One final tip: write on your eligibility form whereabouts in the report the relevant bit of information came from. You could also write on the report of the study which part of the form a particular section helps with. It's much easier to come back to this and find out why you came to a decision.