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Typically, the analyst will also consider what circumstances may change the relation in question. For example, a review might consider the extent to which women use a more relationship-oriented leadership style compared with men. Usually, the research problem will be defined as a relation between two variables, such as the influence of an independent variable on a dependent variable. In the past three decades, the scholarly community has embraced the position that reviewing is itself a scientific method with identifiable steps that should be followed to be most accurate and valid.Īt the outset, an analyst carefully defines the variables at the center of the phenomenon and considers the history of the research problem and of typical studies in the literature. Consequently, literature reviews of studies can be extremely influential, particularly when meta-analysis is used to review them. Meta-Analysis Rationale and ProceduresĪs in any scientific field, social psychology makes progress by judging the evidence that has accumulated. Meta-analysis might be thought of as an empirical history of research on a particular topic, in that it tracks effects that have accumulated across time and attempts to show how different methods that researchers use may make their effects change in size or in direction. The practice is also known as research synthesis, a term that more completely encompasses the steps involved in conducting such a review.
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Because these quantitative reviews are analyses of analyses, they are literally meta-analyses. In other words, meta-analyses bring together the results of many different studies, although the number of studies may be as small as two in some specialized contexts. Meta-analysis uses statistical techniques to summarize results from different empirical studies on a given topic to learn more about that topic.