What international literature is useful in the Australian context?
The problem
When gathering and synthesising existing research evidence to answer a current Australian practice or policy question, it is often necessary to draw on international literature. But how do you decide which countries are most useful to include literature from?
The solution A solution
There is no single solution. Instead, you have a range of options and you need to consider which imperfect approaches to combine to meet your needs.
Below is a practical example from my own work. It demonstrates that there are rough guidelines you can follow when thinking about what countries are similar to Australia at a macro level, but that ultimately, the topic you are investigating will influence your sampling decisions.
Practical example
I recently led a substantial and rigorous review of the research evidence on coercive control victimisation (MacDonald et al., 2024). We searched research literature from the previous decade. Coercive control is a significant practice and policy issue in Australia. However, we identified only 3 peer-reviewed studies from Australia.
However, we knew international research could offer urgently needed additional insights about prevalence, risk factors and impacts associated with coercive control victimisation. So we set out to screen studies by country to identify research findings that may help to understand and address coercive control experiences in Australia.
As a starting point, we took the lead of Esdaile and colleagues (2019) and used three inclusion requirements to limit international literature to countries similar to Australia. To be included in our study, the international research studies on coercive control needed to come from a countries:
- considered to be high income earning according to the world bank
- with a majority English-speaking population
- with a population between 4 and 70 million.
The third requirement is about excluding “very large countries and small island states so the comparison was relevant to Australia” (Esdaile et al., 2019, p. 1543).
These three requirements got us half the way there. We now had a sample of 13 studies from Australia, Canada, Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Wales has a smaller population than 4 million, but we decided to include studies from Wales because it would have otherwise been the only country in the United Kingdom to be excluded. This is an example of the practical decisions that need to be made about where to draw and adjust the line.
The last step was to decide what to do with the studies we identified from the USA. Studies from the USA were excluded because of the large population size of that country. This is noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because Australia is influenced by the USA in many ways, including in terms of popular film and music. Secondly, we identified 40 otherwise relevant studies from the USA. Remember that we only identified 13 from Australia and studies meeting our three requirements.
We needed to dive deeper and think about the specific topic and what it required of us in the decision-making process. We found that there were practical reasons why it would be appropriate to exclude the USA studies.
We found that prevalence rates of intimate partner violence in Australia are equivalent to the average prevalence across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (approximately 1 in 4 women); whereas prevalence rates for the USA are among the highest for OECD countries (approximately 1 in 3 women)(OECD; 2020).
Canada was a country that met all three requirements for our review, and so was considered to be similar to Australia. One of the Canadian studies we sampled compared their findings about coercive control victimisation to findings from the USA (Kaukinen & Powers, 2015). They did this specifically because the rate of intimate partner violence was much higher in the USA than in Canada.
They suggested that differences in rates of intimate partner violence between Canada and USA may be based on economic factors. In Canada, women have greater access to “income-supplementing programs, such as family leave, extensive employment insurance, and social welfare programming, which likely insulate women from the risk for violence by male intimate partners” (p. 240).
Our final decision to exclude the USA studies was based on the USA being disproportionate to Australia and other countries similar to Australia in terms of population size and rates of intimate partner violence. Given that there were 40 studies from the USA and only 13 from Australia and other similar countries, including the USA studies would have also been disproportionate in terms of the overall sample. If there were a smaller number of USA studies than we may have decided to include them.
Given additional time and resources that we didn’t have for the project, another option could have been to review the USA studies separately from the studies from Australia and similar countries. We know already that the prevalence of coercive control would be higher in the USA. But this comparison would allow us to see whether there were consistent or novel insights relating to risk and impact factors associated with coercive control victimisation in the USA compared to Australia and similar countries.
Related content
References
Esdaile, E., Thow, A. M., Gill, T., Sacks, G., Golley, R., Love, P, et al. (2019). National policies to prevent obesity in early childhood: Using policy mapping to compare policy lessons for Australia with six developed countries. Obesity Reviews, 20(11), 1542-1556. doi:10.1111/obr.12925
Kaukinen, C. E., & Powers, R. A. (2015). The role of economic factors on women’s risk for intimate partner violence: A cross-national comparison of Canada and the United States. Violence Against Women, 21(2), 229-248. doi:10.1177/1077801214564686
MacDonald, J. B., Willoughby, M., Gartoulla, P., Cotton, E., March, E., Alla, K & Strawa, C. (2024). What the research evidence tells us about coercive control victimisation (Policy and Practice Guide). Melbourne: Child Family Community Australia, Australian Institute of Family Studies.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). (2020). Intimate partner violence. OECD family database. Paris: OECD. Retrieved from www.oecd.org/els/soc/SF-3-4-Intimate-Partner-Violence.pdf