Abstract:

The Handbook of Research Synthesis and Meta-Analysis is about research synthesis which is the practice of systematically distilling and integrating data from a variety of sources in order to draw more reliable conclusions about a given question or topic. The books draws upon years of groundbreaking advances that have transformed research synthesis from a narrative craft into an important scientific process in its own right. The authors have assembled leading authorities in the field to guide the reader through every stage of the research synthesis process--problem formulation, literature search and evaluation, statistical integration, and report preparation. The book incorporates state-of-the-art techniques from all quantitative synthesis traditions. Distilling a vast technical literature and many informal sources, the book provides a portfolio of the most effective solutions to the problems of quantitative data integration. Among the statistical issues addressed by the authors are the synthesis of non-independent data sets, fixed and random effects methods, the performance of sensitivity analyses and model assessments, and the problem of missing data.