“Any form of face-to-face psychotherapy delivered to groups or by non-specialists deployed in LMICs.” These three studies below you included don’t have psychotherapy as the intervention, unless I’m missing something.
Ah yes, I admit this looks a bit odd. But I’ll try to explain. As I said in the psychotherapy CEA on page 9 (I didn’t try to hide this too hard!):
Similarly, most studies make high use of psychotherapy. We classied a study as making high (low) use of psychological elements if it appeared that psychotherapy was (not) the primary means of relieving distress, or if relieving distress was not the primary aim of the intervention. For instance, we assigned Tripathy et al., (2010) as making low use of psychotherapy because their intervention was primarily targeted at reducing maternal and child mortality through group discussions of general health problems but still contained elements of talk therapy. We classied “use of psychotherapy” as medium if an intervention was primarily but not exclusively psychotherapy.
I also tried to show the relative proportion of papers falling in each category in the first figure:
The complete list of studies with low or medium use of psychotherapy elements are:
One concern I anticipate is: “were you sneaking in these studies to inflate your effect?” and that’s certainly not the case. In a model in an earlier draft of the analysis but didn’t make the final cut, I regressed whether a trial made high, medium, or low use of psychotherapy on the effects. I found that, if anything, the trials without “high” use of psychotherapy elements have smaller effects.
In lieu of a reference, I’ll post the R output where the outcome is in SD changes in mental health measures.
I plan on being stricter with the studies I include in the next analysis version. When I first did this meta-analysis, I thought quantity was more important than quality, and I think my views have changed since then. I don’t think including these studies less relevant to psychotherapy affects the results too much other than moving the results to align with the “psychosocial” intervention prior.
I also recognize that this is probably confusing, and we didn’t explain this well. These are things I will return to when we return to this analysis and give it an upgrade in rigour and clarity.
Ah yes, I admit this looks a bit odd. But I’ll try to explain. As I said in the psychotherapy CEA on page 9 (I didn’t try to hide this too hard!):
I also tried to show the relative proportion of papers falling in each category in the first figure:
The complete list of studies with low or medium use of psychotherapy elements are:
One concern I anticipate is: “were you sneaking in these studies to inflate your effect?” and that’s certainly not the case. In a model in an earlier draft of the analysis but didn’t make the final cut, I regressed whether a trial made high, medium, or low use of psychotherapy on the effects. I found that, if anything, the trials without “high” use of psychotherapy elements have smaller effects.
In lieu of a reference, I’ll post the R output where the outcome is in SD changes in mental health measures.
I plan on being stricter with the studies I include in the next analysis version. When I first did this meta-analysis, I thought quantity was more important than quality, and I think my views have changed since then. I don’t think including these studies less relevant to psychotherapy affects the results too much other than moving the results to align with the “psychosocial” intervention prior.
I also recognize that this is probably confusing, and we didn’t explain this well. These are things I will return to when we return to this analysis and give it an upgrade in rigour and clarity.