The psychopathology of everyday art: a quantitative Study - World ...

techniques which compensate for unreliability of variables 213 require information which
is often unavailable from these studies, and because there was considerable variability in
definition of terms, I have decided that this technique would require too many estimations
of quantities which are not predictable in this range of studies and therefore be unreliable
and inappropriate 214 .
Method of selection of studies
31 studies from the pool of controlled studies, series uncontrolled studies, validity and
reliability studies employed more than one rater. The numbers assigned to them in
Chapter 2 215 were retained through the further elimination procedures and eventual
analysis. 6 studies (11, 12, 39, 43, 65, 66) were eliminated because they reported 'hit
rates' rather than reliability between raters: that is, they compared the rating with the
actual diagnostic group, but not between raters. 25 studies were retained for further
analysis.
Replication studies which tested the reliability of former studies and proved
them unreliable (9, 14, 50, 10, 37) were eliminated and those which did not compare
groups on diagnosis (58, 59, 48, 49, 31, 20, 61), together with 2 studies which included
no figures for analysis (3, 52; study 3 did provide some figures for suicide groups of
patients with personality disorder against non-suicides, but gave no indication of the
213
J.E. Hunter, F.L. Schmidt and G.B. Jackson (1982), Meta Analysis: cumulating research findings
across studies , Beverley Hills, CA: Sage.
214 Rosenthal (1984) also considers this procedure too burdensome.
215 see Table of Authorities for numbers assigned to all control, validity and reliability studies, Appendix
3. Studies selected for meta analysis are marked (M).
168