Cumulating Evidence about the Social Animal: Meta‐Analysis in Social‐Personality Psychology
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: Like most scientific fields, social‐personality psychology has experienced an explosion of research related to such central topics as aggression, attraction, gender, group processes, motivation, personality, and persuasion, to name a few. The proliferation of research can be a monster unless it is tamed with the scientific review strategy of meta‐analysis, literally analyses of past analyses that produce a quantitative and empirical history of research on a particular phenomenon. The purpose of this article is to outline the basic process and statistics of meta‐analysis, as they pertain to social‐personality psychology. Meta‐analysis involves: (i) defining the problem under review; (ii) gathering qualified reports and putting their findings and methods into a database, (iii) analyzing that database, and (iv) interpreting the results and reporting them. Use of meta‐analytic strategies has paralleled the knowledge explosion in social‐personality psychology, but must be used and consumed with careful discernment if the cumulated evidence about the social animal, Homo sapiens , is to have maximal value.
Authors: Blair T. Johnson, Marcella H. Boynton
Institution: University of Connecticut
Language: English
Subfield: Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Sage Foundation, University of Cambridge
OpenAlex ID: W2097963520