Building on the past: advancing theory in services through meta-analysis

We contend that, by integrating research findings across multiple studies, meta-analysis in service research is a powerful tool to achieve conceptual clarity and integrate various disciplinary perspectives into a coherent theoretical framework that provides a rigorous explanation of service phenomena. In this paper we focus mainly on the theory building function of meta-analyses. We start with a brief discussion of the benefits of meta-analyses for research, followed by an overview of its core steps, and show, through an example, how meta-analysis can be used for theoretical advancement.