In many scientific fields, meta-analysis has become the standard method for summarizing research findings. The number of published applications of the method has been steadily growing in the last 25 years and the statistical procedures of meta-analysis continue to become more and more advanced. This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the statistical procedures for meta-analysis with correlations as an effect size.

Contenu

Preface; Introduction; Theory: Statistical Methods of Meta-Analysis; Effect Sizes; Families of Effect Sizes; The r Family: Correlation Coefficients as Effect Sizes; The d Family: Standardized Mean Differences as Effect Sizes; Conversion of Effect Sizes; A General Framework of Meta-Analysis; Fixed Effects Model; Random Effects Model; Mixture Models; Classes of Situations for the Application of Meta-Analysis; Approaches to Meta-Analysis; Hedges and Olkin; Procedures for r as Effect Size; Procedures for d as Effect Size; Rosenthal and Rubin; Hunter and Schmidt; Refined Approaches; DerSimonian-Laird; Olkin and Pratt; Changes in Parameters to be Estimated by the Choice of an Approach; Comparisons of the Approaches; Summary; Method: Monte Carlo Study; Aims and General Procedure; Distributions in the Universe of Studies; Parameters; Drawing Random Correlation Coefficients; Approximations to the Sampling Distribution of r; Evaluation of the Approximations; Details of Programming; Summary; Results; Preliminaries; Estimation of Parameter [mu]r; Bias and Accuracy; Homogeneous Situation S1; Heterogeneous Situation S2; Heterogeneous Situation S3; Relative Efficiency of the Estimators; Significance Tests: Testing [mu]r = 0; Confidence Intervals; Homogeneity Tests; The Q-Test; Homogeneous Situation S1: Type I Error Rates; Heterogeneous Situations S2 and S3: Power; The Hunter-Schmidt Approach to the Test of Homogeneity: The 75 per cent and 90 per cent Rule; Estimates of Heterogeneity Variance; Homogeneous situation S1; Heterogeneous Situations S2 and S3; Summary; Discussion; List of Figures; List of Tables; Nomenclature; References; Appendix A: Technical Details of the Simulation Procedure; Beta Distributions in the Universe of Effect Sizes; An Annotated Mathematica[trademark] Notebook for a Comparison of Approximations to the Exact Density of R; Appendix B: Tables and Figures of Results; Estimation of the Parameter [mu]r; Subject Index; Author Index