Current Methods for Meta-Analysis

The bulk of conceptual and statistical developments as well as applications of meta-analysis have been published in the last 30 years. The methods for meta-analysis continue to be refined and new methods are applied to new types of research questions and data. Such current approaches, issues, and developments prevalent in the behavioral sciences are presented, reviewed, and discussed in this paper. The areas that are covered include: the fixed effects and random effects model of meta-analysis, new findings concerning effect sizes and their statistical properties, the comparison of different meta-analytic approaches, and multivariate procedures for meta-analysis. The latter also covers the stepwise combination of meta-analysis and structural equation modeling (MASEM).