Product Description

What research designs and methodological features qualify a study for meta-analysis and which disqualify it? What types of research reports are appropriate for the meta-analysis? What is the cultural and linguistic range of the studies to be included? By integrating and translating the current methodological and statistical work into a practical guide, the authors address these questions to provide readers with a state-of-the-art introduction to the various approaches to doing meta-analysis. Through the use of a simple metaphor, that of meta-analysis as a form of survey research in which research reports, rather than individual people, are surveyed, the authors show readers how to develop a coding form for their meta-analysis, how to select and gather various research reports for the study, how to code the appropriate information about each study's characteristics, and how to analyze the resulting data using various software packages.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #309340 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-18
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Review

"A book that describes the steps involved in a meta-analysis in an easy-to-understand format (not just as a cookbook recipe) will be a useful addition to the literature. Practical Meta-Analysis aptly fills this niche."

-- Review

Review

"A book that describes the steps involved in a meta-analysis in an easy-to-understand format (not just as a cookbook recipe) will be a useful addition to the literature. Practical Meta-Analysis aptly fills this niche."

(Chockalingam Viswesvaran ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH METHODS, April 2002 )

About the Author

Mark W. Lipsey is the Director of the Center for Evaluation Research and Methodology, and a Senior Research Associate, at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies (Ph.D. in Psychology from The Johns Hopkins University in 1972). His professional interests are in the areas of public policy, program evaluation research, social intervention, field research methodology, and research synthesis (meta-analysis).  The topics of his recent research have been risk and intervention for juvenile delinquency and substance use, early childhood education programs, and issues of methodological quality in program evaluation research. Professor Lipsey serves on the editorial boards of Evaluation and Program Planning, Psychological Bulletin, the Journal of Experimental Criminology, and the American Journal of Community Psychology, and boards or committees of, among others, the National Research Council, the Department of Education What Works Clearinghouse, Campbell Collaboration, and Blueprints for Violence Prevention. He is a recipient of the American Evaluation Association’s Paul Lazarsfeld Award, the Society of Prevention Research’s Nan Tobler Award, a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, and co-author of the program evaluation textbook, Evaluation: A Systematic Approach and the meta-analysis primer, Practical Meta-Analysis.

 

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Customer Reviews

Excellent Source Book
I just completed a meta-analytic study for my master's thesis, and I could not have done it without this book. The authors take very complex topics and procedures and describe them in clear, concise terms. I often used this book to help me interpret the dense text found in other books on meta-analysis, such as Hunter and Schmidt's Methods of Meta-Analysis. I also found the book helpful because it provided concrete guidelines for such issues as selecting criteria for study inclusion and developing categories for coding studies.

Approachable and practical
This book is approachable and does a nice job laying out the issues relevant to meta-analysis. I believe it targets a more beginner level rather than advanced or more specialized techniques.