A systematic review of global academic studies on mental health policy from 1990 to 2019 analyzed the overall characteristics of research methods in this field, in order to understand the development history and current status of mental health policy research methods, and hope to provide a reference to serve for the mental health policy study in our country.

By searching the Web of Science Core Collection and the Cochrane Library, literature was screened, classified and statistically analyzed by using a two-level coding.

1 066 articles were included for analysis. In the past 30 years, the number of literature on mental health policy research was showing an upward trend. Since 1990, literature of qualitative research was dominant in each five-year stage, and the proportion ranged from 66.1% to 92.4%. Expert opinion of qualitative research was in the leading position from 1990 to 2014, and the proportion ranged from 43.3% to 84.8%. The proportion of quantitative research increased rapidly from 7.6% in 1990-1994 to 22.6% in 2015-2019 while structural qualitative research increased from 8.6% to 34.7%. In the quantitative research, the data sources mainly included survey data and second-hand data; the designs of quantitative research were mainly longitudinal research (41.6%,n=119) and cross-sectional research (39.5%, n=113). There were also few randomized controlled trials (5.6%, n=16), cohort study (4.5%, n=13), quasi-experimental study (3.8%, n=11), systematic review (3.5%, n=10) and ecological study (1.0%, n=3). The qualitative analysis methods included literature review and systematic review, theoretical perspective/framework analysis (mainly WHO framework, Kingdon multi-source flow framework, Walt and Gilson policy analysis framework and Bronfenbrenner′s ecological model) and qualitative data analysis (mainly document content analysis and case study).

Qualitative research has always been the main type of mental health policy research, and the data analysis methods for qualitative research have been constantly enriched; discourse analysis, ethnography, phenomenological method, etc. may become a new section of qualitative research on mental health policy. In the quantitative type of mental health policy research, cross-sectional and longitudinal research were the main methods in the early stage, and many methods have been applied in recent ten years such as randomized controlled trial, quasi-experimental study, ecological study; econometric method is a new direction in which quantitative analysis methods in this field can be expanded in the future.

Mental health; Health policy; Methods; Review