— by Shelley Boulianne (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
When: November 29th, 2022, 10–12 am
Where: WI Flexroom (A1 04)
Abstract: Meta-analysis is an important technique to summarize the consensus within scientific scholarship on a topic. In this workshop, I will review techniques for finding political communication studies to use in a meta-analysis or research synthesis (first hour). In particular, I will summarize the search practices of existing published meta-analyses in political communication, but also offer my own assessments of the costs and benefits of different search practices. This presentation will be useful to anyone conducting research in political communication, including graduate students starting their thesis and/or senior professors who are starting a research project in a new area. I will offer an additional session (optional second hour) on coding the content of these studies. In particular, I will explain the vote counting method (is the effect significant or not?) and the use of zero-order correlations in meta-analysis. I will also review popular moderators considered in political communication meta-analyses (e.g., surveys vs. experiments, country, year of data collection, sample type, etc.) and offer some tips to organize the coding of studies. I will conclude with specific suggestions about how to write quantitative articles to enable meta-analysis in this field of research and reflect on how the open science movement impacts meta-analysis in the field of political communication.
Shelley Boulianne (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin–Madison) is an (incoming) Professor of Digital Political Communication at ESPOL – Université Catholique de Lille in France. She conducts research on media use and public opinion, as well as civic and political engagement, using meta-analysis techniques, experiments, and surveys.
Co-organized with the WI research group “Digital News Dynamics“.