OT Capstone Project

One of the first steps of a systematic or scoping review is to define your question. 

Things to keep in mind:

• Your question may go through several iterations as you become more familiar with and learn about your topic.
• You may need to perform some exploratory initial searching to get a better sense of what might be an appropriate scope of the question and how you will define each of your concepts before running your "official" search.

The PICO Framework is commonly used to help define focused clinical questions for systematic reviews and evidence-based medicine.

Keep in mind that, depending on the type of question you are asking, the I does not always have to be a true intervention, and may be more of an exposure or variable of interest.

For example, in a prognosis question, your I could be things like age, gender, or disease stage.  In an etiology question, your I could be things like exposure to second-hand smoke as a child. 

Neither of these things are interventions in the sense that you are not doing something to the population, but in your PICO question they would represent your I component.

The PCC Framework is commonly used for scoping review questions, as it is a broader question framework.

In this framework, the concept is the primary or core concept from your overall research question.  The context might be things like specific settings, geographical locations, cultural factors, and more.