Add information that varies between trial arms as extra columns to your meta-analysis dataset

Creates two additional columns for each selected variable in which information is stored separately for the intervention and control group. This is typically useful when trial-level variables (i.e. variables that differ between trial arms) are to be included in the final meta-analysis dataset.

Usage

addTrialArmInfo(.data, ...,
            .group.indicator = "condition",
            .name.intervention.group = "ig",
            .name.control.group = "cg",
            .vars.for.id = c("study", "primary",
                             "Outc_measure",
                             "Time", "Time_weeks"))

Arguments

.data

A data.frame containing unique intervention-control group comparisons, as created by the expandMultiarmTrials function.

...

<dplyr_data_masking>. The name of several columns (included in .data) that are trial-level variables to be added as columns to .data. To add multiple variables, simply separate them using a comma.

.group.indicator

character. Name of the column in .data which encodes the intervention/control group rows.

.name.intervention.group

character. Name used in the .group.indicator variable to identify the intervention group rows.

.name.control.group

character. Name used in the .group.indicator variable to identify the control group rows.

.vars.for.id

character vector, containing column names of all variables used to construct unique comparison IDs.

Value

addTrialArmInfo returns a dataset as class data.frame. This dataset contains all the information previously stored in .data, plus two columns for each selected trial arm variable (one for the intervention and one for the control group).

Details

Before running the meta-analysis, it is necessary to select only the rows containing calculated effect sizes ('es'). This results in an information loss when data differs between trial arms within one study (e.g. the sample size n is often not identical in both arms of a study); only the row of the "active"/intervention arm is selected, and the information of the control group arm is discarded.

addTrialArmInfo is a convenience function which allows to avoid this information loss by adding trial-specific information as extra columns in the dataset. Two columns are created for each feature: one containing the value of the intervention arm, and another containing the information in the control arm.

The function is only applicable to datasets with expanded multiarm trial; that is, the output of expandMultiarmTrials (or expandMultiarmTrials, followed by calculateEffectSizes).

For more details see the help vignette: vignette("metapsyTools").

See also

expandMultiarmTrials

Author

Mathias Harrer mathias.h.harrer@gmail.com, Paula Kuper paula.r.kuper@gmail.com, Pim Cuijpers p.cuijpers@vu.nl

Examples

if (FALSE) {

# Example 1: calculate effect sizes
# then add "Post_N" as trial arm variable
data("inpatients")
inpatients %>%
  checkDataFormat() %>%
  expandMultiarmTrials() %>%
  calculateEffectSizes() %>%
  addTrialArmInfo(Post_N) %>%
  filterPoolingData(primary == 1)

# Example 2: add several trial arm variables simultaneously
inpatients %>%
  checkDataFormat() %>%
  expandMultiarmTrials() %>%
  calculateEffectSizes() %>%
  addTrialArmInfo(Post_N, Rand_N, Cond_spec) %>%
  filterPoolingData(primary == 1)
}