2: Methodology

The main objective of this chapter is to outline the steps and rationale for conducting the scoping review that identified the gaps in the research that aided in the development of the online survey. It begins with a brief description of scoping reviews. Arksey and O'Malley's (2005) six steps for creating a scoping review are then outlined as they were used as a guide to create this scoping review. Some of the methodological strengths and weaknesses of this study are then outlined.

Keywords: Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews; meta-analysis (PRISMA) analysis process; PubMed; scoping reviews; selection bias

There are many different analytical approaches that researchers can use to examine the evidence of a topic, such as Bayesian meta-analysis, content analysis or critical interpretative synthesis (Kastner et al., 2012). For this study, a scoping review methodology was used since it was anticipated that there would be a diverse range of studies about the COVID-19 pandemic and autism. Scoping reviews give researchers the opportunity to examine a large amount of diverse research. In contrast, systematic literature reviews only give researchers the flexibility to examine a relatively small number of studies that answer specific research questions (Munn et al., 2018).