Steps to Perform a Meta-Analysis

1
Steps to Perform a Meta-Analysis

• Define the meta-analytic research question
• Locate the relevant literature
• Calculate effect sizes and code moderating
  variables
• Analyze the meta-analytic database
• Report and interpret the results

2
Define the Meta-Analytic Research Question

• Purpose of this step
• Determine what hypotheses your meta-analysis will
  test
• Estimate the strength of an effect
• Determine moderators of an effect
• Determine what types of studies you will include
  in your analysis

3
Define the Meta-Analytic Research Question

• Goals for this step
• Hypotheses should have theoretical value
• Should have specific inclusion criteria to make
  locating studies easier
• Included studies should be appropriate for the
  hypotheses being tested

4
Locate the relevant literature

• Purpose of this step
• Obtain the population of studies related to your
  research hypotheses
• Modify the hypotheses and inclusion criteria of
  your analysis to better fit the literature

5
Locate the relevant literature

• Goals for this step
• Should find every study that has investigated the
  effect of interest
• Make your hypotheses better address the questions
  that researchers have investigated in primary
  research

6
Calculate effect sizes and code moderating
variables

• Purpose of this step
• Determine what effects you will examine in each
  study
• Compute a specific estimate of the size of each
  effect
• Determine the value of your moderating variables
  for each effect

7
Calculate effect sizes and code moderating
variables

• Goals for this step
• Accurately determine effect size estimates and
  moderator codes
• Should try to have estimates for every effect
• Typically have two different people calculate
  effect sizes and code moderators so you can
  estimate reliability

8
Analyze the meta-analytic database

• Purpose of this step
• Perform descriptive analyses to determine the
  overall strength and consistency of the effect
• Perform moderator analyses to determine if study
  characteristics influence the effect size

9
Analyze the meta-analytic database

• Goal for this step
• Analyses should be valid
• Analyses should directly answer the research
  questions

10
Report and interpret the results

• Purpose of this step
• Summarize the results of your analyses
• Relate your analyses to the research questions
• Draw conclusions based on your analyses

11
Report and interpret the results

• Goals for this step
• Verbally describe the implications of your
  analyses
• Report any limitations you see regarding your
  analysis
• Violation of assumptions
• Power
• Representativeness
• Suggest areas of future research