Influencing the “People Who Count”

Abstract

How is it possible to get influential policy makers and practitioners to attend to the importance of the findings from meta-analyses? Several approaches that will help to ensure that meta-analytic results will have maximum impact are prescribed. It is recommended that easily understandable metrics such as Pearson's r be employed. Furthermore, it is suggested that null-hypothesis significance testing be abandoned and replaced by confidence intervals and common language statistics that clearly describe the preciseness and magnitude of results. Finally, brief comments on some meta-analytic issues are offered.