Meta-Analysis Fixed effect vs . random effects

Abstract

One goal of a meta-analysis will often be to estimate the overall, or combined effect. If all studies in the analysis were equally precise we could simply compute the mean of the effect sizes. However, if some studies were more precise than others we would want to assign more weight to the studies that carried more information. This is what we do in a meta-analysis. Rather than compute a simple mean of the effect sizes we compute a weighted mean, with more weight given to some studies and less weight given to others. The question that we need to address, then, is how the weights are assigned. It turns out that this depends on what we mean by a "combined effect”. There are two models used in meta-analysis, the fixed effect model and the random effects model. The two make different assumptions about the nature of the studies, and these assumptions lead to different definitions for the combined effect, and different mechanisms for assigning weights.