Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2023 Jan 25;23(1):63.
doi: 10.1186/s12909-023-04033-6.

A Modified Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MMERSQI) developed by Delphi consensus

Mansour Al Asmri  1 , M Sayeed Haque  2 , Jim Parle  3
Affiliations

A Modified Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MMERSQI) developed by Delphi consensus

Mansour Al Asmri et al. BMC Med Educ. .

Abstract

Background: The Medical Education Research Study Quality Instrument (MERSQI) is widely used to appraise the methodological quality of medical education studies. However, the MERSQI lacks some criteria which could facilitate better quality assessment. The objective of this study is to achieve consensus among experts on: (1) the MERSQI scoring system and the relative importance of each domain (2) modifications of the MERSQI.

Method: A modified Delphi technique was used to achieve consensus among experts in the field of medical education. The initial item pool contained all items from MERSQI and items added in our previous published work. Each Delphi round comprised a questionnaire and, after the first iteration, an analysis and feedback report. We modified the quality instruments' domains, items and sub-items and re-scored items/domains based on the Delphi panel feedback.

Results: A total of 12 experts agreed to participate and were sent the first and second-round questionnaires. First round: 12 returned of which 11 contained analysable responses; second-round: 10 returned analysable responses. We started with seven domains with an initial item pool of 12 items and 38 sub-items. No change in the number of domains or items resulted from the Delphi process; however, the number of sub-items increased from 38 to 43 across the two Delphi rounds. In Delphi-2: eight respondents gave 'study design' the highest weighting while 'setting' was given the lowest weighting by all respondents. There was no change in the domains' average weighting score and ranks between rounds.

Conclusions: The final criteria list and the new domain weighting score of the Modified MERSQI (MMERSQI) was satisfactory to all respondents. We suggest that the MMERSQI, in building on the success of the MERSQI, may help further establish a reference standard of quality measures for many medical education studies.

Keywords: Delphi; Medical education; Methodological quality; Quality instrument; Quantitative studies.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Comment in

References

    1. Reed DA, Cook DA, Beckman TJ, Levine RB, Kern DE, Wright SM. Association between funding and quality of published medical education research. JAMA. 2007;298(9):1002–1009. doi: 10.1001/jama.298.9.1002. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Smith RP, Learman LA. A plea for MERSQI: the medical education research study quality instrument. Obstet Gynecol. 2017;130(4):686–690. doi: 10.1097/AOG.0000000000002091. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Sawatsky AP, Beckman TJ, Edakkanambeth Varayil J, Mandrekar JN, Reed DA, Wang AT. Association Between Study Quality and Publication Rates of Medical Education Abstracts Presented at the Society of General Internal Medicine Annual Meeting. J Gen Intern Med. 2015;30(8):1172–1177. doi: 10.1007/s11606-015-3269-7. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cook DA, Reed DA. Appraising the quality of medical education research methods: the medical education research study quality instrument and the Newcastle-Ottawa scale-education. Acad Med. 2015;90(8):1067–1076. doi: 10.1097/ACM.0000000000000786. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Higgins JP, Savović J, Page M, Elbers R, Sterne JA: Assessing risk of bias in a randomized trial. In: Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions. 2nd Edition. Chichester: The Cochrane Collaboration and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.; 2019: 205–228.

LinkOut - more resources