What research designs and methodological features qualify a study for meta-analysis and which disqualify it? What types of research reports are appropriate for the meta-analysis? What is the cultural and linguistic range of the studies to be included? By integrating and translating the current methodological and statistical work into a practical guide, the authors address these questions to provide readers with a state-of-the-art introduction to the various approaches to doing meta-analysis. Through the use of a simple metaphor, that of meta-analysis as a form of survey research in which research reports, rather than individual people, are surveyed, the authors show readers how to develop a coding form for their meta-analysis, how to select and gather various research reports for the study, how to code the appropriate information about each study's characteristics, and how to analyze the resulting data using various software packages.