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Quantitative Literature Reviews

Written By Kanwal Jabeen on Thursday, January 12, 2023 | January 12, 2023

Narrative reviews and meta-analytic reviews are two types of quantitative reviews. Almost all quantitative reviews were narrative before meta-analysis became popular.

Narrative reviews emphasized better-designed studies and organized their findings to form a unified picture of the state of knowledge on the problem or topic under consideration. The number of statistically significant results versus nonsignificant results may have been noted. Each study could have been described in a few sentences or a paragraph on its own.

Nonetheless, despite their widespread use, narrative reviews are significantly influenced by the reviewer's subjectivity. According to research, the conclusions of one narrative review can be completely different from the conclusions of another review written by a different author, even when the same articles are reviewed.

Meta-analytic reviews have risen to prominence in recent years. In a meta-analytic review, the reviewer (a) collects a representative or comprehensive sample of articles, (b) codes those articles according to a variety of factors (e.g., study quality, type of intervention used, type of measure used, study outcomes), (c) finds a common metric (e.g., a standardized mean difference

Figure given below shows an example of a graph commonly used in meta-analysis known as a Forest Plot. The forest plot depicts the types of information typically obtained from meta-analyses. metric (e.g., a standardized mean difference effect size) that allows study outcomes to be synthesized, and then investigates how study characteristics vary with study outcomes. The figure depicts the findings of 13 studies that looked into the effects of response cards on academic achievement (in this case, quiz scores). The triangle represents the effect, and the lines on either side represent the 95% confidence intervals. The most common metric for the forest plot is Cohen's d, which is a standardized mean difference effect size.

<img alt="drawing of a Forest Plot used in meta analysis" src="...">

Meta-analysis is an effective method for synthesizing and analyzing a body of quantitative research. However, criticisms of meta-analysis include the fact that it is prone to publication bias (that is, statistically significant results are more likely to be published than nonstatistically significant results) and that it is overly mechanistic. Some people recommend combining meta-analytic and narrative techniques. For example, one could quantitatively summarise each study while also providing a thorough analysis.


Also Read: Qualitative Literature Review

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