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

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…

• MO
  Ministry of Education - Singapore

  Awards: Tier 1, Academic Research Fund Tier 1 grant (FY2017-FRC1-008)