In the world of scientific writing, meta-analysis is the combination of qualitative and quantitative discoveries to form a singular holistic truth. As a student, you will be pooling information which is sometimes empirical and is at other times more philosophical. Striking the proper balance and seeking a universal overarching answer can be one of the greatest challenges of your college learning experience, so we’ll be providing an overview of how to approach this difficult endeavor.

You’re conducting research about previous research

It may be easier to wrap your brain around this concept if you look at it through such a lens. You’re taking previous findings, combining them with other findings handled in different means and on a different level, and making a final statement based on that common bond. You should seek qualitative studies – those which examine the general nature of a thing – and quantitative studies – those which examine the empirical nature of a thing.

You need separate paragraphs introducing different sorts of sources

Whenever we write about a subject which combines two other subjects into one, we need to take care that each of those subjects are properly explored before we dive into our findings. In a meta-analysis paper, it’s imperative that the reader grasps the concepts you utilized in your own research, so it’s a great idea to dedicate entire paragraphs to the disparate data sets you compiled. If you’re looking at 2016’s Hollywood box office returns, for example, and you have one style of information which crunches numbers exhaustively and another which explains trends exhaustively, you should dedicate ample time to both concepts before moving on.

You need to be statistically savvy

Continuing the box office example, let’s say you’re ready to begin the “main course" of your work and meta-analyze the separate data sets. Like the quantitative number-crunching which came before you, you will be creating several bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, and anything else which suits your needs, except this time you’ll be doing so by combining ideas.

You might forge a bar graph which has two bars for each period – one red and one blue, let’s say – and the red bar indicates average dollars spent at the movie theaters in each month in 2016, whilst the blue bar indicates post-viewing satisfaction reports in surveys handed out to patrons on their way out of the theater.

You’re looking for a common cause; if ticket sales are down, are they down because of fading interest in current big-budget movie styles? If ticket sales are up, are they up due to emerging trends in genre interest? Here’s a great website to help you develop your statistical representations, if need be. It’s a valuable skill to add to your arsenal!

You should remember your audience

Lastly, you should avoid slipping into casual prose at any point in your paper. Consider the style and format utilized by your own research; you’re adding to a never-ending pile of data on meta-analysis, and you need to maintain that scholarly standard. Keep sentences clipped (within reason) and avoid extraneous detail.