Incorporating Quality Scores in Meta-Analysis

Soyeon Ahn and Betsy Jane Becker

Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 2011, vol. 36, issue 5, 555-585

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of quality-score weights in meta-analysis. A simulation examines the roles of study characteristics such as population effect size (ES) and its variance on the bias and mean square errors (MSEs) of the estimators for several patterns of relationship between quality and ES, and for specific patterns of systematic deviations related to quality differences. The bias and MSEs of the estimators are large when ESs from low-quality studies deviate from the population ES in specific ways, and bias does not approach zero in these cases. Because meta-analysts can never know whether biases due to quality exist, and because quality weights lead to bias in almost every condition studied, we recommend against the use of quality weights.

Keywords: study quality; quality-score weights; effect size (ES); deviated effect size; standardized mean difference (d-effect size); meta-analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/1076998610393968 (text/html)

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:sae:jedbes:v:36:y:2011:i:5:p:555-585

DOI: 10.3102/1076998610393968

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().