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Although qualitative studies are increasing in the discipline of nursing, their clinical application and knowledge development will be impeded unless the rich understandings revealed in these individual studies can be synthesized. Meta-synthesis is an invaluable method for accumulating knowledge from individual qualitative studies. This article describes a project focusing on qualitative synthesis that the author required her nursing students in a graduate-level research course to complete. In addition, qualitative meta-synthesis is defined, and its benefits are discussed. Then, Noblit and Hare's approach for synthesizing qualitative studies is described. The remainder of the article is devoted to explaining the actual course project and students' evaluation of the project. The benefits of having graduate students conduct a meta-synthesis are many, and as one student shared, "It was a wonderful, very interesting, and challenging way to teach us."
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Cheryl Tatano Beck (2003) studied this question.
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