Step 5: Analyse the spreadsheet to identify various summary patterns
Steps 1 through 4 will provide you with a comprehensive, possibly large spreadsheet. You are now prepared to look in details into the nature and characteristics of the studies that you have included in your evidence map. In this step, you will summarise the characteristics of the papers you obtain.
You can do this using the spreadsheet or you can export the spreadsheet into a comma separated value file (CSV file), then import the spreadsheet into a statistical data analysis package and you will create tables, and charts to examine different aspect of the evidence that you have gathered. Here is a brief but incomplete list of the tables and graphs you will generate:
- A basic tabulation of the important variables (see Figure \ref{152607})
- Cross tabulation of important variables (Figure \ref{361248} and Figure \ref{890251})
- Different types of plots (Figure \ref{346923}) of variables: this could be in the form of histograms, barplots, and plots of categorical variables.