Scoping Studies

The constructing of the research material that was gathered in the second phase of the study is thoroughly outlined in article I (Boldermo & Ødegaard, 2019), which is a literature review.

Hence, this will not be repeated here. However, the methodology that informed the data collection was not outlined specifically in the review article. Thus, this section describes this strategy, which was inspired by ‘scoping studies’ (Arksey & O’Malley, 2005). Arksey and O’Malley contended that rather than an ‘ideal’ type of procedures for conducting a literature review existing, all methods could offer relevant tools for conducting the review, which the researchers had to use appropriately (2005).

The main intention for conducting the literature review was to examine how research in the context of early childhood education for sustainability embraced social aspects.

Particularly, aspects such as diversity and belonging in relation to the situation for children of migrants and refugees in early childhood settings were examined. By the time of the review,

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two literature reviews concerning early childhood research on sustainability had recently been conducted by Margaret Somerville and Carolyn Williams (2015) and by Maria Hedefalk et.al.

(2015). Both of these reviews aimed at following up and completing the already described review conducted by Davis (2009). As Somerville and Williams (2015) did not study issues concerning social sustainability in their review, Hedefalk et al.(2015) found that such social issues were rarely examined. However, this finding was not discussed further in their article.

Therefore, it appeared as interesting to identify what kind of social issues were debated in articles on social sustainability, and what kind of research gaps concerning social issues would emerge. Arksey and O’Malley (2005) have suggested the method of scoping studies as useful when the aim was to identify research gaps in the existing literature and with the purpose of publishing research findings in a particular field of inquiry. The steps that were adopted when conducting the literature review are described in the following paragraph, drawing on Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) suggestions for stages in scoping studies – however, with some repositioning and adjustments.

The first step of the literature review investigated 20 journals of which nine were Nordic journals and 11 were international, within the time span from 2013 to 2018 . These journals were examined through the searching of keywords in titles and abstracts. This first step is in line with Arksey and O’Malley’s (2005) suggestions for a second stage in

conducting a scoping study, identifying relevant studies within chosen terms of time span and language. In this step of the review, 59 articles were chosen for further examining, leading to step two, which is described as stage three in Arksey and O’Malley’s suggestion for scoping studies, namely, ‘study selection’ (2005). In order to eliminate irrelevant studies that did not address the research questions, criteria for inclusion and exclusion were made. All 59 articles were read in full to consider whether they should be included in the review or not. This resulted in the exclusion of 18 of the 59 examined articles from six of the 20 chosen journals, which meant that eventually, 41 articles from 14 journals were included for steps three and four of the review.

Before shortly outlining the third and fourth steps of the review, the descriptions of the stages four and five in scoping studies by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) are briefly explained in the following paragraph. Arksey and O’Malley (2005) described stage four as ‘charting the data’, which involved a technique for interpreting and sorting qualitative data into a data charting form like, for instance, Excel, which recorded information such as authors, years,

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methodology, etc. Further, the authors explained stage five as involving the process of summarising and reporting the results. As the literature review only comprised four steps, steps three and four in the review correspond with stage four in the scoping studies as suggested by Arksey and O’Malley (2005). The 41 articles were organised, not in Excel sheets, but in feature maps using Nvivo²⁷, which visualised the articles’ research questions, methodology, theoretical backgrounds, and also how they related to the review’s research questions. Even if the review did not include a step five in particular, it is obvious that the review was conducted with an aim to report and to publish the results.

Arksey and O’Malley (2005) emphasised the strength of conducting literature reviews as scoping studies, as such a method seeks to present an overview of all of the material that has been reviewed and examined and does not aim to assess the quality of evidence or determine whether the examined studies provide findings that are robust or could be

generalised (2005, p. 27). In order to safeguard transparency, the tables that were developed in steps two and three of the literature review were published as supplementary materials together the list of the 41 articles that eventually were included in the review, as well as an overview of the same articles categorised by methodology. As these tables also visualised all 20 journals that were originally part of the review in step one, and thus also showed which six of them were excluded in step two, the 18 articles that were excluded are not visualised. In retrospect, these excluded articles should also have been listed as supplementary materials in order to ensure the transparency and possibilities of others to follow up the findings.

27 A computer program for text and qualitative data analysis

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