Deciding between a Systematic Review or Scoping Review Using an Interdisciplinary Approach to Social Work and Neuroscience

Background Scoping reviews are comprehensive summaries that help readers grasp the scope of a topic in terms of major concepts, research gaps, and numerous sources and characteristics of research methodology and data. Because they use more expansive inclusion criteria and provide more comprehensive findings, scoping reviews are often thought to be a better fit for defining more ambiguous or intricate topics compared to systematic and meta-analytic reviews. Social work is a subject with many ethical ramifications and little-understood linkages to unexpected specialties, such as medicine, necessitating a review approach that can shed light on murky issues. Because social work involves inherent ethical implications as well as unfamiliar connections to other disciplines, distinct review approaches are used to identify gaps in the literature that could effectively guide future work. Scoping reviews are a relatively new and underutilized technique that is well-suited to a dynamic, changing field like social work. Interdisciplinary Approach to Presenters Scoping Review The presenters have conducted a collective and iterative scoping review to explore the intersection of child maltreatment and neuroscience, an under-researched topic area, from a social work lens. A systematic search was conducted of five electronic databases chosen based on a high probability of indexing social science and neuroscience-related journal articles, reports, and dissertations: Medline, PubMed, CINAHL, and ERICE between 2000 and March 2021. Our analysis followed Arksey and O'Malley's (2005) five-stage methodology, which outlines a systematic framework for searching the existing literature, extracting data, and synthesizing findings. The iterative stages are (1) determining the research questions; (2) identifying relevant documents; (3) document selection; (4) charting the data; and (5) compiling, summarizing, and reporting the findings. This review aims to summarize many of the persistent biological alterations associated with child maltreatment with two goals in mind: 1) To provide a rationale for the inclusion of neuroscience in the study and practice of social work among maltreated children by systematically mapping and synthesizing research performed using methodologies from both fields; and 2) To identify the areas, or regions, of the brain that is altered from maltreatment endured in childhood. Workshop Content & Pedagogical Techniques This 90-minute workshop's learning objectives are to: (1) Give a high level overview of what scoping reviews are, (2) compare other review approaches to scoping reviews, and tips on deciding when to uses each, (3) examine and discuss examples of scoping reviews using our recent scoping review as a case study, and (4) outline the specific steps involved in conducting a scoping review. Learning Outcomes & Implications Participants in the workshop will learn (a) when a scoping review is necessary, (b) how to conduct reviews, and (c) how to plan for and resolve issues and decision points that may arise during the review process. These abilities and the materials supplied can help social work researchers conduct complete assessments of complicated literature as they attempt to address social work's major problems and society's most pressing, but understudied, social issues.