Questions Flashcards
- What is a meta-analysis?
A quantitative synthesis of the findings from other peer-reviewed articles that investigated a similar research question based on strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. The quantitative synthesis gives a weighted average of the effect being investigated.
- How is a meta-analysis different to a systematic review?
A systematic review and meta-analysis use a similar, rigorous search process that is outlined in the PRISMA guidelines. However, a systematic review will include narrative synthesis of the findings of included studies, and a meta-analysis includes the quantitative or statistical synthesis. Therefore, a meta-analysis is able to produce a numerical indicator of effect.
- Why are you doing a meta-analysis and not an original data study?
Over the past four decades there has been growing interest in this research question. These studies span smaller scale cross-sectional studies to larger-scale longitudinal designs. Therefore, within the scope of the thesis year, it is not possible to meaningfully contribute to what is already known on this topic. However, by doing a meta-analysis, we are able to use what all of the other researchers have done and published and meaningfully contribute to knowledge through analysing a weighted average of these effects across the study designs and samples.
- What are Boolean operators?
- Boolean operators are software functions that enable you to either expand or restrict a database search using relevant search terms. For example, you could use AND, OR, or NOT in between search terms, you could use quotation marks to keep multiple word phrases together, or you could use an asterisk to replace different endings to words that have a similar beginning. For example, if you have a word like behaviour or internalizing that have different US and UK spelling variations.
- How does your study differ to the one you reviewed by Wenze et al. (2015)?
- The Wenze et al. (2015) study had a very similar research question. However, it was a systematic review that provided a narrative review of the relevant studies they identified, but did not include a weighted quantitative average of the effect. So, while the studies were summarised, it was unclear from that study if parents of twins had statistically worse outcomes than those of singletons. Further, as the Wenze et al. (2014) study’s search strategy only included relevant articles published up until 2014, there is nearly a decade of new research that has to been synthesised which is important to consider when we know that the rates of twin pregnancies and associated ART use are rapidly increasing, so this research question is becoming more and more relevant.
- Why are you excluding studies that focused on populations who are high risk/used substances?
Including studies with participants from high-risk groups like substance abuse can have a significant effect on the results of our meta-analysis, as the risk for individuals in these groups is typically higher than for the general population.
If we included participants from high-risk groups in our meta-analysis, it may inflate our overall baseline risk estimate, and we could overestimate the effect size, making the risk of twin birth on parental mental health appear higher than it actually is.
or
For the purpose of this meta-analysis, we will be excluding those studies because they introduce the risk of other known risk factors. At this stage, we are wanting to evaluate the baseline risk introduced by twin birth compared with singleton birth, as best we can anyway!
- Survey studies include recruitment of participants. What does your recruitment period look like instead?
The equivalent of the recruitment process for the meta-analysis design is the database searching and screening phase. What this involves is conducting a thorough search on a number of databases with our predetermined and piloted search terms, Boolean operators, and filters, and exporting all of those search results into a referencing manager system. From there, I will create a record of where the results came from and how many of them there were, I will then remove the duplicates so that each search results is only appearing in my list once. Then, I will start the screening process for relevance, starting with the titles, then abstracts, then full-texts.
- What will you do if the studies you include use different outcome measures? Do you have to standardise them?
Well the software we will be using, review manager, has the ability to compare multiple different standardised outcome measures by comparing mean differences, rather than having to go through and standardise them ourselves.
- What information will you be extracting from the studies and why did you choose that information?
Participants, study design, assessment and publication year, country, recruitment method/recruitment site measures, and outcome data in the for of means and standard deviations.
A part of the reason as to why we chose this data is so we are more accurately able to compare them all, and we are also so we can provide an overview on the landscape of the existing research on the topic.
- Why are you only doing a systematic review of the ART risk and not a meta-analysis?
It is only recently that researchers have focussed on the impact of ART on parental mental health. As a consequence, there is little research, and research that we do have is conflicting and may not be comparable for us to conduct a statistical analysis.
Also, a systematic review on its own does not meet the requirements for a thesis as there needs to be an analysis element.
- Are you looking at diagnostic or screening measures?
We have predicted that it will be mostly screening measures, as we predict that most measures will be surveys. Surveys on their own are not sufficient for diagnoses.
- Why are you looking at the 2 year period?
I did an extensive search of the literature, and the most common theme was the two year period. There were not many studies that included pregnancy and beyond 2 years old.
There are a few advantages to why we have done this.
a. It ensures that our studies are comparable, therefore increasing internal validity
b. Focussing on one age period can reduce potential confounding variables, therefore increasing external validity as we are able to better generalise our findings to the population of interest
Why are you only looking at studies after 1980?
xxxx
- Why is now the right time to conduct this meta-analysis on this topic?
The last systematic review with a similar research question was conducted by Wenze in (2015), since then there has been a wealth of new research on the topic, from cross-sectional data to cohort studies. We are wanting to contribute a quantitative analysis to the topic as one has never been done before.
- Why did you choose to focus on depression, anxiety, and stress as outcomes of interest? Are there other outcomes that you considered but ultimately decided not to include?
So far, the research in this area on higher risk births such as twins, have almost exclusively focused on more clinical based outcomes which has primarily included depression, anxiety and stress. As this is a meta-analysis, we are seeking common outcomes in the literature, which might differ to an original data study that might try to understand more specific psychological outcomes or something more novel.
Literature has consistently shown that twin birth has an impact on these outcomes
There a lot of standardised/validated measures for these particular outcomes
