This section will present a typology of policies that directly or indirectly tackle inequalities in the WoW both within the labour market and outside this domain (e.g. education policy).
In order to define the typology of policy areas,
it will be critical to review previous ILO work, in particular de documents outlined by the ToR.
Based on this typology, we will then develop a theory of change to depict policy objectives, components, inputs and functions of distinct types of interventions outlined in the typology.
The section will also identify the theoretical mechanisms and channels through which policies are expected to impact inequalities in forms of work and labour market outcomes.
This section will discuss the systematic scoping review methodology that is proposed to conduct the review of the literature on policy interventions that are expected to address inequalities in forms of work and labour market outcomes.
Unlike systematic reviews, which typically focus on specific policy questions and interventions,
systematic scoping reviews focus on a wider spectrum of policies,
where different study designs and research questions can be investigated.
Since scoping reviews allow both broad and in-depth analyses,
they are the most appropriate rigorous method to make a synthesis of the current evidence in this area.
a cluster containing possible utilized terms will be created, that is for:
definitions of work and labour, forms of work, definitions of inequality, forms of vertical and forms of horizontal inequalities, labour market outcomes, and definitions of policy.
Each of the clusters contains synonymous terms as well as term-adjacent phrase combinations which are in turn used to refine or broaden the search scope to best encapsulate each respective cluster,
The search protocol then follows a three-staged process of execution: identification, screening and extraction.
First, in identification, the above categorizations are combined through Boolean operators to conduct a search through the database repository Web of Science.
Second, in screening, duplicate results are removed and the resulting literature sample is sorted based on a variety of excluding characteristics based on: language, title, abstract, full text and literature supersession through newer publications.
Properties in these characteristics are used to assess an individual study on its suitability for further review.
Narrowing criteria are applied to restrict the sample to studies looking at
i) the effects of individual evidence-based policy measures or intervention initiatives
ii) attempting to address a single or multiple of the defined inequalities in the world of work.
iii) using appropriate quantitative methods to examine the links of intervention and impact on the given inequalities.
To facilitate this screening process, a system of keywords is used to tag individual studies in the sample with their reason for exclusion,
such as 'excluded::language', 'excluded::title', 'excluded::abstract', 'excluded::superseded'.
This keyword-based system is equally used to further categorize the sample studies not falling into an exclusion criteria,
based on primary country of analysis, world region, as well as income level classification.
To that end, a 'country::', 'region::' and 'income::' are used to disambiguate between the respective characteristics,
such as 'region::LAC' for Latin America and the Caribbean,
'region::SSA' for Sub-Saharan Afraca;
as well as for example 'income::low-middle', 'income::upper-middle' or 'income::high'.
These two delineations follow the ILO categorizations on world regions and the country income classifications based on World Bank income groupings [@ilo22countrygroupings].
Similarly, if a specific type of inequality,
or a specific intervention, represents the focus of a study,
The complete process of identification and screening is undertaken with the help of the Zotero reference manager,
ultimately leaving only publications which are relevant for final full-text review and analysis.
Last, for extraction, studies are screened for their full-texts,
irrelevant studies excluded with 'excluded:full-text' as explained above and relevant studies then ingested into the final sample pool.
All relevant information concerning both their major findings and statistical significance are then extracted from the individual studies into a collective results matrix.
The results to be identified in the matrix include a study's:
i) key outcome measures (dependent variables),
ii) main findings,
iii) main policy recommendations,
iv) study design and sample size,
v) dataset and methods of evaluation,
vi) direction of relation and level of representativeness,
