Reusable nappies: research

Appendix A: Literature review protocol

Objectives

The project aims to provide evidence to inform the assessment of potential policy options for further supporting uptake of reusable nappies in Scotland.

The literature review will address the following objectives:

1. To develop a thorough understanding of the behaviours and motivations of families around nappy choices, both what encourages and prevents them from using reusable nappies. This includes understanding of individual/family-level choices but also wider social ‘systems’ that enable or constrain the use of reusable nappies.

2. Understand the overall impacts of schemes to increase reusable nappies use.

Method overview

The literature review will follow rapid evidence assessment/rapid review methodology. This comprises elements of a systematic literature review (e.g. replicable search strategy, transparent inclusion/exclusion criteria), conducted over a short timescale for the timely production of policy relevant research (Thomas et al., 2013). Due to time constraints rapid reviews are necessarily less comprehensive and rigorous than full systematic reviews, including e.g. more limited search strategies, narrower scope or considering a narrower range of research methods.

Keywords

Reusability keywords

• Reusable
• Cloth
• Real

Nappies keywords

• Nappies/nappy
• Diaper

Behavioural keywords

• Behaviour
• Behavior
• Attitudes
• Perception
• Barrier
• Motivation

Intervention keywords

• Intervention
• Evaluat*
• Scheme
• Initiative

Impact keywords

• ‘Environmental impact’
• ‘carbon footprint’
• LCA

*indicates inclusion of related words with different endings e.g. evaluation/evaluate/evaluating

Search strategy: Academic literature

Databases: ISI Web of Science; Google Scholar as secondary source.

Search terms: Boolean combinations of selected keywords from above table.

Recording: Searches are recorded into a spreadsheet, including rationale for either using the outcome of the search, or direction of further refinement.

Date: Date of search

Where searched: Name of database

Date range: Time period

Search string: Exact search string used

Number of papers: Number of papers found with search string

Accepted: Is this the final search string?

Rationale: Why string accepted or rejected, including edits made to next string

Comments: Additional comments

Grey literature

Non-academic literature will be sourced through targeted searching of websites of relevant organisations (see table below) using organisational website search functions and/or Google Site Search, supplemented by identification of grey literature through the Google Scholar searches described above. The grey literature returned through these two approaches will be screened according to the same inclusion criteria as the academic literature (see below). While the focus will be on publicatons from Scotland and the UK, some international literature will be included by searching key organisations at the European level.

Organisation category: Scottish and UK organisations

Organisations: The Scottish Government; Zero Waste Scotland; SEPA, UK Government; WRAP; Environment Agency; Women’s Environment Network

Organisation category: Scottish Local authorities*

Organisations: North Ayrshire Council; Dumfries & Galloway; East Renfrewshire; Inverclyde; West Dunbartonshire; Edinburgh City Council, East Lothian.

Organisation category: International organisations

Organisations: RREUSE; European Environment Agency

* Targeting council areas where there are known local authority or community schemes in place.

For government websites, and websites that allow searching by document type (such as research reports, publications), searches for research reports will be carried out on these websites. For other websites, searches will be carried out through google site search, which allows for Boolean combinations of keywords.

Recording: Search strings used will be recorded and, as far as possible, the same search strings will be used across all organisational websites. Due to the diversity of content likely to be returned by searches, there will be no systematic recording of the results of searches in terms of the number of entries returned.

Screening

For each accepted search, returns will be screened by title and abstract/executive summary by a single researcher. Acceptance/rejection of returns will be decided with reference to the inclusion/exclusion criteria set out below. For Google Scholar searches, only the first 100 returns (10 pages of search results) for each search will be screened for inclusion due to the diminishing likelihood of relevance beyond this point. To check consistency, 50 returns from Web of Science will be screened for acceptance/rejection by a second person and agreement rate calculated. All sources accepted as part of the screening process will be entered in a database and duplicates removed.

Data extraction

The analysis of full texts will involve extraction of information into a spreadsheet matrix. For each source, a line in the matrix will be completed. Categories of data to be recorded are:

• Categorisation of whether study speaks to a) understanding attitudes and behaviour, b) understanding impacts of schemes, c) both, or d) general impacts (not scheme specific)
• Study type (qualitative/ quantitative/ mixed / review)
• Population
• Geographical scope
• Sample size
• Study design (cross-sectional; repeated cross-sectional; natural experiment; experimental; review; LCA; other)
• Barriers to using reusable nappies
• Motivations/drivers to using reusable nappies
• Other relevant attitudes/perceptions/beliefs about reusable nappies
• Description of any scheme/intervention studied
• Attitudes to schemes
• Scheme impacts: economic
• Scheme impacts: environmental
• Scheme impacts: social
• Other relevant impacts of switching to reusable nappies to capture (not scheme-specific)

The matrix will be used to synthesise across studies to address the dual objectives of understanding attitudes towards reusable nappies and assessing the impact of schemes to support use of reusable nappies.