ABSTRACT
Researchers are pursuing attempts to develop and validate procedures to meaningfully combine data from single case design (SCD) studies. This chapter reviews some of those attempts and addresses the purposes of outcomes synthesis in general, guidelines for performing narrative reviews, synthesizing studies based on visual analysis, and data extraction. Summative evaluations of outcomes, and the development of quantitative metrics, have generally been conducted with the purpose of combining outcomes across multiple studies; however, some have advocated for the reporting of quantitative effect size metrics for single studies. The chapter provides suggestions for using both visual and statistical analyses. In SCD studies, data for individual cases are presented via graphs rather than with summary statistics such as means and standard deviations; this is a considerable advantage for data analysts. Overlap metrics are one type of quantitative index suggested for use to synthesize effects across SCDs.
