Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T11:04:34.490Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Don't Get Too Confident: Uncertainty in SDρ

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2017

Scott B. Morris*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology
Samuel T. McAbee
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology
Ronald S. Landis
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology
Kristina N. Bauer
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Scott B. Morris, Department of Psychology, Illinois Institute of Technology, 3105 South Dearborn, Chicago, IL 60616. E-mail: scott.morris@iit.edu

Extract

Tett, Hundley, and Christiansen (2017) raise an important issue related to meta-analysis and our frequent overinterpretation of point estimates to the diminishment of variability of the estimate. We view this as analogous to the situation in which weather forecasters communicate the likely track of hurricanes. Such predictions involve point estimates of where the center of the storm is likely to be at some future time. These point estimates can be connected to identify the most likely path of the storm. In addition to these point estimates, however, forecasters caution that we should also attend to the “cone of uncertainty.” That is, we should not focus exclusively on the point estimate to the exclusion of the errors of prediction.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Borenstein, M., Hedges, L. V., Higgins, J. P. T., & Rothstein, H. (2009). Introduction to meta-analysis. Chichester, UK: Wiley.Google Scholar
Brannick, M. T., & Hall, S. M. (2003). Confidence intervals for the random-effects variance component. In Brannick, M. T. (Chair), Advances in meta-analysis. Symposium conducted at the 18th Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Orlando, FL.Google Scholar
Cumming, G., & Fidler, F. (2009). Confidence intervals: Better answers to better questions. Zeitschrift für Psychologie/Journal of Psychology, 217, 1526.Google Scholar
Evangelou, E., Ioannidis, J. P., & Patsopoulos, N. A. (2007). Uncertainty in heterogeneity estimates in meta-analyses. BMJ: British Medical Journal, 335 (7626), 914916.Google Scholar
Hedges, L. V., & Olkin, I. (1985). Statistical methods for meta-analysis. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hedges, L. V., & Vevea, J. L. (1998). Fixed- and random-effects models in meta-analysis. Psychological Methods, 3, 486504.Google Scholar
Higgins, J., & Thompson, S. G. (2002). Quantifying heterogeneity in a meta-analysis. Statistics in Medicine, 21, 15391558.Google Scholar
Morris, S. B., Daisley, R. L., Wheeler, M., & Boyer, P. (2015). A meta-analysis of the relationship between individual assessments and job performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100, 520.Google Scholar
Oswald, F. L., & Johnson, J. W. (1998). On the robustness, bias, and stability of statistics from meta-analysis of correlation coefficients: Some initial Monte Carlo findings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 83, 164178.Google Scholar
Tett, R. P., Hundley, N. A., & Christiansen, N. D. (2017). Meta-analysis and the myth of generalizability. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice, 10 (3), 421456.Google Scholar
Viechtbauer, W. (2005). Bias and efficiency of meta-analytic variance estimators in the random-effects model. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 30, 261293.Google Scholar
Viechtbauer, W. (2007). Confidence intervals for the amount of heterogeneity in meta-analysis. Statistics in Medicine, 26, 3752.Google Scholar
Viechtbauer, W. (2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package. Journal of Statistical Software, 36, 148.Google Scholar