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Fostering overseas success: A meta-analysis 97 new documents, we are confident that our meta-analysis is representative for the current body of research. 5.4.2 Inclusion Criteria To be included in the meta-analysis, documents had tomeet three criteria. First, only English documents were included to avoid construct ambiguity and interpretation errors. Second, their sample had to involve individuals who had recently relocated to a country other than that of their origin and for work-related reasons. Samples of missionaries, military personnel, entrepreneurs, and employees of non-governmental organizations were thus included; samples of tourists, refugees, and students were not. Third, documents had to empirically examine and report the relevant statistics on at least one relationship between social support and success criteria (i.e., adjustment, commitment, performance, or retention). Documents were excluded if the relevant statistics were not reported and the authors did not respond to or were unable to fulfill our request for such data. The first author and a research assistant who received extensive training independently coded each document for inclusion. The complete database of 733 documents was evaluated following the step-wise process described above. Eighty-seven documents were unanimously marked for inclusion and 607 documents were unanimously rejected, resulting in an interrater reliability of 94.7%. Of the thirty-nine documents with discordant ratings, twenty were included after tripartite discussion with the second author. However, of these twenty documents, eleven authors were unable to provide the necessary statistics and two documents were the working papers of already included published papers. 6 The final set of 94 documents represented 84 independent samples. Table 5.1: Keywords by their respective cluster. Social support Expatriate success Sample support adjustment expat * adaptation sojourn * acculturation inpat * performance transpat * effectiveness country national * success global professional * failure global worker * attrition overseas assign * retention international assign * intent * global assign * cognition * withdraw * commit * Note : 130 (1 x 13 x 10) keyword combinations were used. An asterisk ( * ) means that the keyword was truncated and thus extended versions of that keyword were also included. 6 An overview of included and excluded studies can be provided upon request.