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Meta-Analytic Structural Equation Modeling with Moderating Effects on SEM Parameters
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Description: Meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) is an increasingly popular meta-analytic technique that combines the strengths of meta-analysis and structural equation modeling. MASEM facilitates the evaluation of complete theoretical models (e.g. path models or factor models), accounts for sampling covariance between effect sizes, and provides measures of overall fit of the hypothesized model on meta-analytic data. Despite the benefits of MASEM, the current MASEM-methods do not take advantage of a major strength of standard meta-analysis, which is the ability to explain heterogeneity in effect sizes across studies by including study-level moderators. Therefore, we propose a novel MASEM method, One-Stage MASEM, which is better suitable to explain study-level heterogeneity than existing methods. One-Stage MASEM allows researchers to incorporate continuous or dichotomous moderator variables into their MASEM, in which any parameter in the structural equation model (e.g. path coefficients and factor loadings) can be modeled by the moderator variable, while the method does not require complete data for the primary studies included in the meta-analysis. We illustrate the new method on two real datasets, and provide user-friendly R-functions and annotated syntax to assist researchers in applying One-Stage MASEM.