Dear colleagues,

me and my research team are currently conducting a meta-analysis within the school context, so we face various studies that used multilevel analyses for their data. Therefore I have two questions:

1. Is there a "state of the art" method to address multilevel data within meta-analyses? E.g. if study one reported individual as well as class-level data and study two only reported class and school level data?

2. Is there a way to conduct multilevel analyses within meta-analyses? E.g. if all data was entered on individual level and if class size or number of classes is known, is there a way to cluster these data? I am aware that meta-analysis itself can be seen as some form of hierarchival analyses, but I am really interested if there is a way to analyze synthesized studies the same way primary studies analyze school data.

Thank you so much for your reply and best regards,

Angelika