Ameta-analysis is a statistical analysis of a group of different studies. It is a way of examining the effect of one variable on another variable across a whole body of literature—and not just a single study. For example, if we want to look at the effect of happiness on coping skills, we can perform a meta-analysis on all the available studies on this topic in order to determine the overall effect size of this relationship. Meta-analyses give us much more robust and reliable information than data from individual studies.