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The current paper reviews four practical issues that may be encountered in meta-analyses of applied social science research, and presents a multidisciplinary review of some approaches that have been used to resolve these.
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In these cases, researchers may look across disciplines, to view meta-analysis through other disciplinary lenses, and see the similarity between issues encountered in their own reviews and issues that have been encountered, and addressed, in the work of others. This lack of communication is particularly acute in disciplines that have only recently begun to use meta-analysis and where research data are less structured than in clinical disciplines. Indeed, it is difficult for even experienced meta-analysts to follow ongoing methodological and technical debates and keep up with latest findings, especially across different substantive disciplines (Schulze, 2007).
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Other problems seem to have been raised independently in different disciplines, with a lack of overarching consensus on how to resolve them, and individual study authors applying ad hoc resolutions as they encounter each issue. Some of these issues have been addressed by review co-coordinating bodies, and recommendations have been made on how to deal with them for example, the issue of publication or small-study bias has been carefully addressed (Higgins & Green, 2011). With the diversity of new applications for meta-analysis, new issues in implementing the methodology have arisen. The application of meta-analysis to social science research, however, is not necessarily straightforward, and methods developed in medical research may be difficult to access and apply to social research, especially for applied researchers seeking to use meta-analysis in their own disciplines for the first time.Ī number of techniques and processes, each requiring methodological choices, fall under the umbrella term ‘meta-analysis’. In the social sciences, the use of meta-analysis is rapidly increasing (Figure 1), with meta-analysis being applied to an ever-broader range of subject matter. Currently the medical sciences produce the majority of the literature on meta-analysis, including meta-analysis methods. Advanced meta-analysis techniques can also be used to discover what study-level or sample characteristics have an effect on the phenomenon being studied for example, whether studies conducted in one cultural context show significantly different results from studies conducted in other cultural contexts.Īlthough meta-analysis was originally devised for use in the social sciences (Glass, 1976), the technique was quickly adopted and further developed for use in the medical sciences. Together, systematic reviews and meta-analyses can help to clarify the state of a field of research, determine whether an effect is constant across studies, and discover what future studies are required to demonstrate the effect. Meta-analysis refers to the statistical techniques used to combine this information to give an overall estimate of the effect in the population. A systematic review refers to the process of systematically locating and collating all available information on an effect. These techniques are used to synthesise research results to determine an overall effect estimate for a population of studies. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are increasingly important techniques in social science research. The discussion aims to share and improve methodology in systematic reviews and meta-analysis by promoting cross-disciplinary communication, that is, to encourage ‘viewing through different lenses’. The paper presents an overview of each issue with a review of potential resolutions, identified from similar issues encountered in meta-analysis in medical and biological sciences. The four issues are: scoping and targeting research questions appropriate for meta-analysis selecting eligibility criteria where primary studies vary in research design and choice of outcome measures dealing with inconsistent reporting in primary studies and identifying sources of heterogeneity with multiple confounded moderators. The current paper identifies potential resolutions to four issues that may be encountered in systematic reviews and meta-analyses in social research. Meta-analysis is especially useful for combining evidence to inform social policy, but meta-analyses of applied social science research may encounter practical issues arising from the nature of the research domain. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are used to combine results across studies to determine an overall effect.