ABSTRACT
The basic idea of qualitative meta-analysis is to provide a concise and comprehensive picture of findings across qualitative studies that investigate the same general research topic. As Schreiber, Crooks, and Stern propose, qualitative meta-analysis is characterized by the aggregating of a group of studies for the purposes of discovering the essential elements and translating the results into an end product that transforms the original results into a new conceptualization. Qualitative researchers often approach their research with a loose conceptual framework that informs their strategy for data gathering. The use of a conceptual framework in qualitative meta-analysis is similar to how it is used in individual qualitative studies using a tentative conceptual framework as a system for organizing data. The meta-analytic conceptual framework thus may be provisionally drafted by the meta-analysts on the basis of their conceptual thinking, or the meta-analysts may employ a conceptual framework used in one of the primary studies.
