120-160 minutes
What you can expect to learn (learning outcomes)
This module will teach you to:
- Recognize characteristics of different effect measures
- Identify ways in which continuous outcomes and their comparisons can be expressed
- Define a meta-analysis
- Decide when it is appropriate to conduct a meta-analysis
- Identify and understand the data presented in forest plots
- Identify heterogeneity between included studies
- Consider heterogeneity appropriately when making decisions about analysis
- Interpret the results of subgroup analysis
- Consider the analysis of other (non-standard) data in included studies
- Recognize non-standard study designs
Authors, contributors, and how to cite this module
Module 6 has been written and compiled by Dario Sambunjak, Miranda Cumpston and Chris Watts from Cochrane Central Executive Team., with the expert input from the Cochrane Statistical Methods Group.
A full list of acknowledgements is available in the ‘About’ section within the module.
This module should be cited as: Sambunjak D, Cumpston M, Watts C. Module 6: Analysing the data. In: Cochrane Interactive Learning: Conducting an intervention review. Cochrane, 2017. Available from interactivelearning.cochrane.org/module-6.
Update and feedback
The module was last updated in January 2025.
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