**5.2 Criteria of entering meta-analysis**

Some researchers argue that the mixing of various literature in meta-analysis can be confusing and obscure the understanding of the facts each single studies trying to tell(Guss 1995). Also meta-analysis is sometimes criticized for mixing good and bad studies together, which is known as "garbage in and garbage out(Hunt 1997)" issue (Rosenthal and DiMatteo 2001).

Although this criticism is mainly from the quantitative research field, same suspicion exists in the qualitative field. For example, in the research of Barroso et al. (2003), when taking a meta-analysis on HIV infection, around 20% are excluded(Barroso, Gollop et al. 2003). In the research of Jones (2004) on pragmatic health service, 132 papers were read in full, but only 17 met the inclusion criteria.

Meta-analysis seeks to identify as many potentially relevant studies as possible that meet the research question for a given review topic. The included studies vary considerably in their objectives, methods, data and findings. Excluding some studies indicates factitious frame that restricts the boundary of researches. But in reality, along with the merging and crossing among disciplines and methodologies, it is impossible to limit the research views, thus unadvisable to set strict criteria. In fact, the criteria of goodness and badness are objective and in some sense context dependent. Different communities of researchers have different criteria of goodness and these criteria change all time. Additionally, it is with large possibility that the criteria will bring along the problem of rising bias in the meta-analysis.

From the view of vulnerability research, because vulnerability is such a complex characteristic of society-economy-nature system, and is impacted by almost all aspects in this system, in part of the studies the vulnerability is expressed implicit and even equivocal, especially in qualitative studies, where the concepts, meanings and expressions are diversely. This is substantiated in the literature searching in this study. In fact among the 128 collected studies,

A Meta-Analysis Framework and

**6. References** 

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over 50% are with the expression of "impacts", "losses", "suffering from", or "changes of life", even no these kind of words but only a description of the phenomena. Therefore, this study on the vulnerability to coastal hazards includes as many as possible literatures, and no special criteria set up to exclude or include studies. In the process of full-text reading, the synthesists analyze the literatures and mine the connotative driving factors and their causing relations of vulnerability from all studies. This requires skills in semantic (literal) and idiomatic (meaning) translation of key ideas in studies(Noblit and Hare 1988).
