Maximising Technology Usage in Research Synthesis of Higher Education Professional Development Research

Synthesising Literature

An initial research activity was to perform a content analysis, with the prime objective of determining the trends, key issues, and challenges being identified in the research literature. This type of content analysis requires an examination of large volumes of information, scaffolded by a theoretical framework for the identification of themes and concepts that emerge from that data (Zimitat, 2006). Quantitative research studies consider such a content analysis as a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis studies use a statistical technique combining effect sizes reported in each research study. The result of a meta-analysis provides an overall summary of the outcomes of a number of studies by calculating a weighted average of their effect sizes (Ary, Jacobs, Razavieh, & Sorensen, 2009). The social science research paradigm (encompassing education) is largely one of qualitative research, a paradigm that creates problems for conducting meta-analysis. Therefore a systematic review is appropriate for this content analysis task. ‘The systematic review process differs from meta-analysis and research synthesis in that it describes the whole process of identifying all the relevant literature within a given area’ (Torgerson, 2003, p. 29).