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ANNEX 5: LITERATURE SEARCH METHODOLOGY

The literature search involved three stages:

• Stage One: identification of potential references using a range of search strategies and exclusion criteria
• Stage Two: retrieving references identified in stage one and reading pages 1-2 to ensure relevance
• Stage Three: using references retained in stage two as the basis for the literature review

The process of identifying relevant research for this review was twofold: general Quality of Life ( QOL)/well-being literature and studies of culture and sport activities with objectives or evaluations related to the concepts of QOL/well-being.

STAGE ONE

Searches were conducted as follows:

• electronic database searches
• web searches
• review of web sites of key organisations/research centres
• contact experts
• posts to lists
• journal searches
• bibliography reviews

Electronic databases

We searched the following four electronic databases: BIDS, Medline, PsycINFO and the Value of Sport Monitor:

Notes: searches for the term well-being and its variant spellings proved problematic owing to the generic nature of the term. For this reason, searches using this term were restricted to "title" at all times and additional exclusion criteria were used.

General exclusion criteria

This is not a systematic literature review and it was subject to significant restraints in relation to the efforts that could be expended: a total of thirty person days. In searching for research on QOL and well-being, the objective was to identify articles in which the title suggested that these terms were discussed conceptually or in relation to how they are defined or measured. In order to ensure that this focus was achieved, a range of exclusion criteria was employed:

• Economics literature (undertaken by David Bell)
• Studies related to countries other than Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand
• QOL discussed in the context of a specific medical condition
• QOL discussed in the context of a specific medical specialism
• QOL discussed in the context of a specific medical procedure/intervention/treatment

Additional exclusion criteria

PsycINFO

This database did not allow the search to be restricted to reviews hence it produced a particularly large number of results. In order to reduce the number of results and to meet the objectives of the search, additional criteria for exclusion were applied as follows:

• QOL discussed in the context of a specific population, ie war veterans, single parent families, ex-offenders
• QOL discussed in the context of a specific lifestyle issues: relating to sexuality, religious practices, marital status
• QOL discussed in the context of a specific social issues: ranging from inequality and poverty to gambling and body image
• QOL discussed in the context of education or employment
• QOL discussed in the context of living conditions, ie nursing homes, living abroad
• Research focused on particular aspects of methodology related to conceptualisation/definition/measurement of QOL
• Dissertation abstracts, book reviews, correspondence

Exceptions to these exclusion criteria were made where the title indicated that the research related to arts, culture, sport, leisure, exercise, architecture, design. Accordingly, separate searches were not conducted in relation to keywords arts, culture and sport in PsycINFO.

Searches on well-being

These searches produced large numbers of irrelevant references owing to the generic nature of the term and as such the following additional exclusion criteria were used:

• Results with only the word "well" in the title
• Well-being of a specific population, i.e. students, homosexuals, drug users
• Welfare-state related
• Environment-related
• Book reviews

Cultural and sport research

The exclusion criteria used here was as follows:

• Culture used in the anthropological/sociological sense; relating to corporate culture, dependency culture, consumer culture, gay culture, street culture, material culture, political culture
• Where the journal title rather than the research included culture/cultural.
• If arts did not relate to arts activity

Contact with experts

A number of experts on QOL were contacted with a view to identifying research relating to culture and sport. This produced very little in the way of further information with the useful exception of a draft paper by Alex C. Michalos on QOL and arts which has since been published in Social Indicators Research.

Journal searches

Manual searches were made of two key journals: Social Indicators Research and QOL Research dating from 1995. 99 articles were identified during this process, which included duplicates from the database searches.

Web sites of key research centres / organisations

• Arts and Quality of Life Research Centre, Temple University
• International Society for Quality of Life Studies
• International Society for Quality of Life Research
• Gallup Positive Psychology Center
• Australian Centre on Quality of Life
• Quality of Life Research Centre, Claremont Graduate University
• Quality of Life Research Unit, University of Toronto
• Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy and the National Institute for Economic Research

General web searches

Web searches were undertaken using Google and the following search terms:

• "quality of life" research arts culture
• "quality of life" sport
• "sport and quality of life"
• "cultural indicators" quality of life

Bibliography searches

The bibliographies of papers relating to quality of life/well-being and culture/sport were searched for further relevant references.

Results

These searches, once the exclusion criteria had been applied to references identified via the electronic databases, produced 221 references.

STAGE TWO

At this stage, all 221 references were retrieved and a further selection process took place based on a brief survey of each reference.

The selection of references for inclusion in the literature review was further refined by applying the following exclusion criteria:

• primary focus of paper is not QOL or well-being (eg it may be referred to, or it may provide the context, but the paper is principally concerned with statistical weighting techniques, or developing a new model of health)
• commentary or polemic
• economics literature (and therefore being dealt with by David Bell)
• highly medically specific
• explicitly does not deal with concept, definition or measurement of QOL or well-being
• cities/urban studies literature.

On the basis of reading the first two pages of the papers, in effect the references were checked to ensure that they complied with the stage one criteria. A few papers that had come through were now excluded. In addition, it was decided at this stage, given the time constraints of the project, to exclude the urban studies literature on QOL in cities to allow the literature review to concentrate on areas more directly transferable to culture and sport.

STAGE THREE

Following the process employed in stage two, and the identification of further references from these bibliographies, a total of 244 references were included in the literature review. The final stage of the search and scoping process involved coding each of the references according to:

• year
• subject/discipline
• article type (review article, primary research)
• methodology (type of review, research methods)
• population type (ie individuals, groups, general population)
• country of origin (ie base of lead author)
• priority (in terms of significance to the literature review)

This allowed the selected material to be grouped and organised, and the literature review to be planned effectively.

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