Quality Appraisal for Meta-Analysis

Quality appraisal tells you how good or bad the research studies you have included in your systematic review are. I start this chapter by introducing the biases covered in the popular Cochrane Risk of Bias tool. I will also outline where there are issues with the suitability of this and similar tools used to evaluate psychology experiments. I’ll provide a worked example of quality appraisal I performed in Cooke et al. (Self-affirmation promotes physical activity. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 36(2), 217–223. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.2013-0041 , 2023), showing how I judged the quality of one of the included studies. The chapter ends with a consideration of quality appraisal of correlational studies. I will introduce the Quality of Survey Studies in Psychology checklist, which is designed for appraising survey studies.