Data Synthesis for Meta-Analysis

Meta-analysis assigns greater weight (importance) to correlations or effect size differences based on larger samples relative to correlations or effect size differences from smaller samples. Building on material covered in Chap. 2 , this chapter outlines how meta-analysis uses sample sizes from included studies to weight the importance of findings from the literature. We’ll talk about how you estimate heterogeneity between effect sizes, and visualise differences between studies using forest plots, before covering statistics on publication bias and funnel plots to visualise potential publication bias. This material will prime the reader to conduct meta-analyses in jamovi as covered in Part II of the book.