[R-meta] meta-analysis vs. re-analysis
Greetings! I am wondering about the differences (and some citations to support the logic) between meta-analyses and re-analyses. We conducted a systematic review of the literature, then of the papers we decided to include in our study, we contacted the authors and requested their raw data. (I think that the reason for this decision is irrelevant to my question but I would be happy to explain if that is helpful.) With their raw data, we answered the question(s) we were interested in by fitting hierarchical Bayesian regression models (controlling for study and other clustering/non-independence elements within each study. We were interested in student performance within different types of classrooms.) My intuition is that: 1) This is a re-analysis of the data, not a meta-analysis (because there was nothing meta about it!) 2) We do not need to or show any of the typical quality assurance/sensitivity analyses, like fail safe number, funnel plots, etc. I am not even entirely sure how we would do this given that our unit of observation is finer-grain than study. (We re-analyzed the student-level data the original papers published.) We have included a histogram of the means from each study to show that it is roughly normal in shape, to show that we don't have crazy sampling. Can anyone weigh in? Am I distinguishing re-analysis from meta-analysis appropriately (or is the semantics debate unwarranted)? Can you point me to a good citation(s) that distinguish re-analyses from meta-analyses? And is my intuition correct that we don't need to provide additional sensitivity analyses? Thanks so much for your help! Cheers. Elli
<http://www.biology.washington.edu/users/elli-jenkins>Elli J. Theobald, PhD Research Scientist Biology Education Research Group Department of Biology University of Washington, Seattle https://sites.google.com/site/ellijtheobald <https://sites.google.com/site/ellijtheobald/home> [[alternative HTML version deleted]]