Meta-analytic structural equation modelling with missing correlations

Cheung and Chan (2005) proposed a two-stage method to conduct meta-analytic structural equation modelling (MASEM). MASEM refers to the technique of fitting structural equation models to pooled correlation or covariance matrices from several studies. Unfortunately, researchers do not always report all correlations between the variables of interest. In this paper, we propose a method to deal with missing correlations in the two-stage approach. We illustrate the proposed model with a meta-analysis of teacher-child relationships variables from 99 studies. In addition, using simulated data, we show that our method leads to more precise parameter estimates than the existing approach.