Hello Mike,
in your 2014 article on MASEM (Behav Res, DOI 10.3758/s13428-013-0361-y) you mention individual participant data (IPD) meta-analysis as a tool for addressing issues in MASEM, such as categorical response variables. I am wondering what would be an advisable analytic strategy for MASEM with IPD (assuming a fixed effects model).
Here are several options I found:
(1) One approach could be to extract a correlation matrix from each study and analyze it with TSSEM in metaSEM.
(2) Cooper and Patall (2009, Psych. Methods) mention that study can be used as a stratification variable.
(3) Curran and Hussong (2009, Psych. Methods) suggest including study membership as a categorical predictor as well as its interactions with other predictors in the model.
From my perspective, approach 1 is straightforward, but I am not sure whether it is applicable to my specific case (models based on categorical items, cluster sampling). Approach 2 is straightforward to implement, e.g. in Mplus, but I am not sure about its drawbacks. It just seems too easy. Approach 3 seems impractical with complex SEMs because including several latent/observed interactions quickly leads to overcomplex models and estimation problems.
What would be the best choice?
Many thanks
Johannes