Treating Uncertainty in Meta-Analytic Results

Abstract

Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) describe two main sources of uncertainty that are usually reported in a meta-analysis: uncertainty about the value of the underlying mean correlation (which they describe as SE(rxy)) and uncertainty about the individual values of rho that arise from the random-effects variance (the square root of which they describe as SD(rho)). They proceed to recommend descriptions of small, medium, and large values of each uncertainty that meta-analysts should report and consider for interpretation. However, there exists a simpler solution to expressing and interpreting such uncertainty.