Weighing Evidence “Steampunk” Style via the Meta-Analyser

Jack Bowden and Chris Jackson

The American Statistician, 2016, vol. 70, issue 4, 385-394

Abstract: The funnel plot is a graphical visualization of summary data estimates from a meta-analysis, and is a useful tool for detecting departures from the standard modeling assumptions. Although perhaps not widely appreciated, a simple extension of the funnel plot can help to facilitate an intuitive interpretation of the mathematics underlying a meta-analysis at a more fundamental level, by equating it to determining the center of mass of a physical system. We used this analogy to explain the concepts of weighing evidence and of biased evidence to a young audience at the Cambridge Science Festival, without recourse to precise definitions or statistical formulas and with a little help from Sherlock Holmes! Following on from the science fair, we have developed an interactive web-application (named the Meta-Analyser) to bring these ideas to a wider audience. We envisage that our application will be a useful tool for researchers when interpreting their data. First, to facilitate a simple understanding of fixed and random effects modeling approaches; second, to assess the importance of outliers; and third, to show the impact of adjusting for small study bias. This final aim is realized by introducing a novel graphical interpretation of the well-known method of Egger regression.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00031305.2016.1165735 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:amstat:v:70:y:2016:i:4:p:385-394

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/UTAS20

DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2016.1165735

Access Statistics for this article

The American Statistician is currently edited by Eric Sampson

More articles in The American Statistician from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().