Methods for dealing with multiple outcomes in meta-analysis:a comparison between averaging effect sizes, robust variance estimation and multilevel meta-analysis

This study investigates three methods to handle dependency among effect size estimates in meta-analysis arising from studies reporting multiple outcome measures taken on the same sample. The three-level approach is compared with the method of robust variance estimation, and with averaging effects within studies. A simulation study is performed, and the fixed and random effect estimates of the three methods are compared with each other. Both the...