Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
Review
. 2019 Dec;29(4):387-396.
doi: 10.1007/s11065-019-09415-6. Epub 2019 Aug 24.

A Guide to Conducting a Meta-Analysis with Non-Independent Effect Sizes

Mike W-L Cheung  1
Affiliations
Review

A Guide to Conducting a Meta-Analysis with Non-Independent Effect Sizes

Mike W-L Cheung. Neuropsychol Rev. 2019 Dec.

Abstract

Conventional meta-analytic procedures assume that effect sizes are independent. When effect sizes are not independent, conclusions based on these conventional procedures can be misleading or even wrong. Traditional approaches, such as averaging the effect sizes and selecting one effect size per study, are usually used to avoid the dependence of the effect sizes. These ad-hoc approaches, however, may lead to missed opportunities to utilize all available data to address the relevant research questions. Both multivariate meta-analysis and three-level meta-analysis have been proposed to handle non-independent effect sizes. This paper gives a brief introduction to these new techniques for applied researchers. The first objective is to highlight the benefits of using these methods to address non-independent effect sizes. The second objective is to illustrate how to apply these techniques with real data in R and Mplus. Researchers may modify the sample R and Mplus code to fit their data.

Keywords: Meta-analysis; Multivariate meta-analysis; Non-independent effect size; Three-level meta-analysis.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Plot of multivariate effect sizes and forest plots
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Abramovitch A, Anholt G, Raveh-Gottfried S, Hamo N, Abramowitz JS. Meta-analysis of intelligence quotient (IQ) in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Neuropsychology Review. 2018;28(1):111–120. doi: 10.1007/s11065-017-9358-0. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Albarracín D, Cuijpers P, Eastwick PW, Johnson BT, Roisman GI, Sinatra GM, Verhaeghen P. Editorial. Psychological Bulletin. 2018;144(3):223–226. doi: 10.1037/bul0000147. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Anderson SF, Maxwell SE. There’s more than one way to conduct a replication study: Beyond statistical significance. Psychological Methods. 2016;21(1):1–12. doi: 10.1037/met0000051. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Belleville S, Fouquet C, Hudon C, Zomahoun HTV, Croteau J, Consortium for the Early Identification of Alzheimer’s disease-Quebec Neuropsychological measures that predict progression from mild cognitive impairment to Alzheimer’s type dementia in older adults: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Neuropsychology Review. 2017;27(4):328–353. doi: 10.1007/s11065-017-9361-5. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Borenstein, M., Hedges, L. V., Higgins, J. P. T., & Rothstein, H. R. (2009). Introduction to meta-analysis. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.; Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources