An Evaluation of Multiple Imputation for Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling

Abstract

A simulation study was used to evaluate multiple imputation (MI) to handle MCAR correlations in the first step of meta-analytic structural equation modeling: the synthesis of the correlation matrix and the test of homogeneity. No substantial parameter bias resulted from using MI. Although some SE bias was found for meta-analyses involving smaller numbers of studies, the homogeneity test was never rejected when using MI.