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A practitioner's guide to meta‐analysis
Author(s) -
Durlak Joseph A.,
Lipsey Mark W.
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
american journal of community psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.113
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1573-2770
pISSN - 0091-0562
DOI - 10.1007/bf00938026
Subject(s) - health psychology , meta analysis , field (mathematics) , management science , community psychology , psychology , value (mathematics) , data science , applied psychology , engineering ethics , computer science , public health , medicine , social psychology , engineering , nursing , mathematics , pure mathematics , machine learning
Conclusion Meta‐analysis can be a powerful and useful technique. In the short term, the results of meta‐analysis can increase understanding and influence the future endeavors of researchers interested in a particular field. Over the long term, meta‐analysis provides a vehicle by which large bodies of research can be integrated and focused on public policy issues. Administrative structures currently exist to foster the relationship between research findings and public policy. As one example, Saxe (1986) has described the activities of the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) established by Congress to provide lawmakers with scientific information in such a way as to be useful for policy decision‐making. OTA is commissioned by Congress to provide assessments of scientific findings, and meta‐analyses are an ideal resource in this regard. Saxe (1986) notes “In almost all cases, the emphasis is on making sense of already collected data, thus literature reviews and methods for synthesizing research results are relied upon” (pp. 61–62). Whether meta‐analysis actually plays an important role in public policy depends on many factors, not the least of which is the care with which meta‐analyses are conducted. Hopefully, our comments here will help investigators conduct methodologically rigorous meta‐analyses of research relevant to the field of community psychology.