Factors influencing physical therapists’ clinical reasoning: qualitative systematic review and meta-synthesis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The capacity of physical therapists to reason effectively in patient management is essential to maximizing outcomes. Although conceptual frameworks of clinical reasoning exist, their theoretical foundations are insufficiently validated to establish those factors that are paramount in guiding physical therapists’ clinical reasoning. Studies on how physical therapists clinically reason constitute important means of identifying constructs of such reasoning.Objective: This systematic review aimed to synthesize and interpret the findings of qualitative studies designed to examine factors that are inherent in physical therapists’ clinical reasoning with respect to their knowledge, experiences, and practices.Methods: Searches of studies were carried out in four databases, gray literature, and reference lists. Two reviewers independently assessed methodological quality of the studies using the Critical Appraisal Skills Program (CASP) and performed the analysis: extraction and comparative appraisal of findings, identification of themes, reciprocal translation synthesis, and identification of categories and subcategories.Results: Ten studies were included. Four themes of factors influencing physical therapists’ clinical reasoning emerged, namely, Physical therapist as a source, Patient as a source, Elements of the reasoning process, and Context.Conclusions: The identified themes validated some constructs underlying existing clinical reasoning frameworks. Most influencing factors were related to the physical therapist, which highlights opportunities to improve effective reasoning at this level. The notion that this process is recurrent, multifaceted, and contextual lends itself to changing in accordance with the needs of the patient, consistent with a biopsychosocial perspective. How clinicians weigh biomedical and psychosocial elements in their reasoning however warrants further study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.128 | 0.300 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.019 | 0.021 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".