Identifying Causes of Delay in Construction Projects with Meta-synthesis Approach (Case Study: ASCE Database)

Poor time performance of construction projects is a common problem in the construction industry. Accordingly, from the past until now, numerous studies in different communities have tried to identify the causes of delay in construction projects and each of them, from a perspective, has enumerated them. Since delay is a context-specific phenomenon; there are different views on its causes and the lack of consensus among researchers in this field is obvious. Therefore, in order to bridge the gap, the present study tries to obtain a classified list of causes of delays in construction projects by using the systematic literature review. The research method is meta-synthesis in accordance with the seven-step approach of Sandelowski & Barroso (2006) and the target population of this research is all published research from 1995 to 2021 in ASCE database. After screening according to the selected method, out of 142 identified studies, 26 studies remained in the final list and became the basis for coding. The output of coding analysis was the emergence of 85 unique causes of delay under 21 concepts and 6 categories derived from data. These six categories, which are the main origin of the cause of delays in construction projects, were: Client, contractor, consultant, resources, project and environment.