Background: Synthesis studies are used for the retrieval, review, synthesis, analysis, and integration of the findings of original studies. The purpose of this review was to shed more light on how META-ETHNOGRAPHY works as a method of inductive and interpretative knowledge synthesis, and on its application and implementation in medical sciences.Methods: This was a narrative review study and the statistical population included all scholarly publications on the synthesis of qualitative studies and META-ETHNOGRAPHY published from 1998 to 2022. The search in international and domestic databases led to the extraction of 118 books and articles. After reviewing the titles, abstracts, and full texts of these publications, we included 2 books and 8 articles in the review.Results: META-ETHNOGRAPHY is used for synthesizing the knowledge obtained from qualitative studies to re-conceptualize their findings. There are seven phases in the process of META-ETHNOGRAPHY: Getting started; Deciding on what is of initial interest; Reading the studies; Determining how the studies are related; Translating the studies to each other; Synthesizing the translations; and expressing the synthesis. The number of studies required to perform META-ETHNOGRAPHY has been recently suggested to be 40. Strategies for updating META-ETHNOGRAPHY include repeating the previous strategy and reformulating the strategy according to a new objective, a revised review question, or new inclusion criteria.Conclusion: Noblit and Hare introduced META-ETHNOGRAPHY in 1988 as a qualitative research method for the synthesis of educational ethnographies. Today, it is widely used in healthcare research.

Background and Purpose: The literature review over the past few decades is a reflection of a global specific move towards the competency and evaluation of outcomes based education and the importance of this type of education is to the extent that Harden introduced "competency-based education" through a focus on outcomes and competencies as the most important trend in the medical education in the past decade. Due to the particular importance of competency-based education and the need to review the competency -based curriculum to be based on the competencies, the need to review the design of the curriculum is completely evident. But a question arises here that "Is there a comprehensive model that can be drawn for the development of competency in order to design new curriculum based on it? "In this study, we have tried to develop models to assess and synthesize existing development models, achieve to design a comprehensive META-model for competency development.Methods: META-ETHNOGRAPHY is a useful method for the synthesis of qualitative researches which is used in order to develop models that interpret findings in several studies. Considering that the aim of this study was finally to provide a META-model of competency development, in the first step of META-ETHNOGRAPHY, first three steps and also a criticism was conducted on the available competency development models, for this purpose, literature review was also done to achieve competency development models. The models obtained by search were studied precisely and the models were presented based on first hand description of the by the developer (s), then offering critiques were extracted from the literature and the critical of researcher was finally provided.Results: After determination of the research question and characterization of synthesis focus, inclusion criteria and quality assessment of search were conducted and eight competency development models were selected and a precise investigation has been done on each.Conclusions: Considering the importance of competency-based training at the global level and the urgent need to review the existing curriculum and competency-based curriculum design, the analyzed models can provide the basis for synthesis of a META-model for competency development and curriculum.

Development sociology as a distinct area of study gained prominence in the post-world war era with the evolving interest in political and economic progression of the post-colonial world. The emerging discipline from the mainstream sociology have been particularly interested in development paths and strategies adopted in nations in the various regions of the world with greater emphasis in development trends among the third world nations. This paper chronicled strides in the sub discipline since inception and contributions by scholars towards the growth of the discipline as well as development descriptions, explanation and predictions with the relationship of the western rich nations and third world nations in mind. This paper, hold that the postulations of development sociology as regards global development trends, citizen’s capacity building and citizen’s freedom/access be encouraged by all stakeholders; as well as consciously addressing the issue of income inequality which currently is criminally wide.