A-level Psychology: Meta-analysis

1. Select an area in psychology that interests you.

This need not be a topic you have studied at A Level but any area you find interesting.

Not sure what to pick? Try:

• Browsing front covers and articles from back issues of A-level Psychology Review. You can access this from the Hodder Education Magazines A-level Review section of our Subscription Databases page
• Browsing your textbook or exam specification

Possible examples: obedience, free will, addiction, attachment

2. Try to narrow down the topic so it is very specific.

For instance, if you chose 'obedience', you might narrow this to 'studies of obedience in which the effects of a uniform were investigated'.

A. You can narrow your question by mind mapping - ask yourself questions about your topic. Who? What? Where? Why? When? and How? are always good places to start.

B. You might also have seen a particular study that interests you (or could use a list of influential studies like this to find one) and want to investigate other studies in that area. What question was your chosen study trying to answer?

C. Alternatively you could try an AI tool called Elicit, which searches and summarises academic studies and will also suggest research questions. This isn't a substitute for thinking! It only suggests a small range of questions, which might not be the most interesting or important ones, but it can be a good starting point.

Elicit has recently been updated, and the new version both has very limited free options and is not as good at generating questions. You want Old Elicit.

Elicit allows you to 'brainstorm questions', and once you have selected a question you can 'brainstorm questions' again to refine it until you are happy with it. If you put in more words (e.g. obedience uniform) you will get a different set of questions.

3. Find five or six studies within your preferred area and note the key points

These may be in the form of journal articles or in textbooks, but the Internet is probably the best place to start.

If you are reviewing journal articles on the Internet, you need only read the 'abstract' rather than the whole study. The abstract is a summary of the whole investigation which appears at the beginning of the journal article and will give you all the information you need for your analysis. 

Note key findings and conclusions, alongside the size of the study and any information you can find about how the sample was selected.

Finding your articles

A. Use an academic search engine like Google Scholar

Google Scholar searches for academic articles rather than just websites. Note that you will not be able to access many of these articles because they are behind paywalls (although you can often read the abstract for free, which may be all you need). You do have free access to any artocle that has a [PDF] link to the right of the search result.

B. Try an AI search and summary tool like Elicit.

Note that while Elicit does some summarising for you, it has access access to fewer studies than a search engine like Google Scholar AND it is only 90% accurate so you still need to read the abstracts yourself.

Elicit will produce a very short summary of the article, which is often too short to be useful. HOWEVER, you can limit your search by type of paper and date. You can also limit to PDFs that you can access (although you can always access the abstract):

Limit the STUDY TYPE to Randomized Controlled Trial  and Longitudinal. This means you only get actual studies, not researchers giving summaries of other people's studies.

You will also want to add some extra columns using the box on the left, giving the Intervention, Outcomes measured and Number of participants. Elicit extracts this information from the papers. You will need to click on each paper and check the abstract to make sure Elicit has done this properly.

Click on the title of each study that you choose for more details:

4. Compare and evaluate the findings of the different studies.

What are the key findings? Do the studies you have found largely agree or disagree with each other? Where they disagree, how will you decide which results are more reliable?

1. Was the sample size reasonable? How was it selected?
2. Do other authors criticise the study (both Elicit and Google Scholar allow you to track who has cited an article)?
3. What do you think of the study design? Can you see any obvious sources of bias or error?
4. Are there any obvious issues with the funding of the study or the credibilty of the authors?
5. Are the results surprising or expected? Do they fit in with other information you have?

5. Summarise what you have found.

When you have details of several studies, try to summarise what you have found. What general conclusion, if any, can you make about your area of interest? What other questions are suggested?

6. Reflect on your analysis.

Were some studies better than others? Why? Did you have enough sources? Does more research need to be conducted? Would you like to find out more about this area? Any specific questions?