ABSTRACT
Meta-analysis is a quantitative form of systematic review in which results from studies are pooled and aggregated mathematically. The methodology guiding meta-analysis has several key steps. In sport and exercise psychology, the most common form of review is narrative – that is, a review that draws an informal inference about a specific phenomenon. A meta-analysis is only as good as the research question it is testing. A mistake many researchers make is to assume that aggregating many papers on a particular phenomenon is sufficient to warrant a meta-analysis. In systematically generating a research question and inclusion criteria, the researcher should have developed ideas regarding what study characteristics need to be coded from the retrieved literature. Once the research question has been set, the selection criteria have been implemented, the literature has been retrieved, and the data extracted, researchers can move to analysing for the pooled effect of interest.
