Meta-Analysis: A Booster to Social Science Research

Abstract

Ample of researches has been done in the field of education even after the less requirement of further research however they are in need of organisation of existing researches. Meta-Analysis is the methodological and statistical approach to systematically & logically arrangement of the abundant of empirical studies and synthesizing results to draw conclusions from findings. Using the meta-analysis, researchers may be able to respond to two serious problems: easy integration of studies dealing with the same problem in order to respond to it precisely and the mutual comparison of different studies. This paper is an attempt to aware about the basic concepts involved in meta-analysis, goals to achieve, need to execute meta-analysis, myths and realities attached to meta-analysis following by the criticism of it. This will give guidelines to the researcher for keeping in mind the questions which he/she wants to explore through meta-analysis, knowledge about the selection of the studies and what kind of answers the researcher would be able to get after performing meta-analysis.