Design and application of a meta-evaluation framework

One critical aspect of research is identifying the relevant literature and synthesizing this information to understand the current development of a field and frame opportunities for future research. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a research method used to identify the literature through the application of a rigorous protocol that ensures transparency of the process and increases validity of the work. While a SLR identifies and characterizes the literature, the next step to comprehensively understanding the research area is to synthesize the content of relevant previous work. There are many approaches to research synthesis including meta-analysis and meta-synthesis. Both analysis methods have the same constraint - they are limited by characteristics of the current literature. In organizational research, this presents a significant challenge due to the variety of disciplines typically participating in this research and the lack of consistency in reporting research findings. In addition, the literature in these fields tends to include both qualitative and quantitative studies, further complicating the synthesis. The purpose of this work is to define a meta-evaluation framework to integrate the findings obtained from a quantitative meta-analysis and qualitative meta-synthesis. In this exploratory work, the framework is applied to the results from two recent SLRs.