The method of the quantitative review “meta-analysis”

Zusammenfassung

A meta-analysis is one of several ways to summarize, integrate and interpret a set of research publications. Glass (1976) differentiated meta-analysis from primary and secondary analysis in this way: “Primary analysis is the original analysis of data in a research study. […] Secondary analysis is the re-analysis of the data for the purpose of answering the original research question with better statistical techniques, or answer new questions with old data. […] Meta-analysis refers to the analysis of analyses […,] the statistical analysis of a large collection of analysis results from individual studies for the purpose of integrating the findings.”