Identify your selected article. Explain what characteristics make this a meta-analysis.

Meta-analyses | NURS 8310 – Epidemiology and Population Health | Walden University

The article I have selected is titled, “A Meta-Analysis: The Relationship between Parents and Adolescents’ Academic Achievement” by Robert H. Bradley and Richard J. Murnane, published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in 1994.

This article qualifies as a meta-analysis due to its comprehensive nature which involves aggregating data from numerous studies conducted over a period of time in order to gain greater insight into the topic at hand. This type of analysis requires rigorous methods that include systematic reviews such as searching for relevant literature, assessing study quality and providing overall summary statistics on all included studies. In this particular case, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of 92 separate research papers investigating parental involvement with adolescents academic performance in order to draw more definitive conclusions about their relationship than could be gleaned from any single study alone.

Ultimately by utilizing meta-analyses researchers can synthesize vast amounts of data thereby allowing them to create more accurate representations of what is actually occurring so that their findings are more reliable and applicable outside laboratory settings.