Impact of friends/family support on mental health

Limitations and Implications

There are various limitations which impact on the quality of this study. These limitations result both from the research method to the content of the research. There are several limitations of meta-analysis which impact on the quality of the research. Meta-analysis suffers heterogeneity due to the selected articles for analysis. The articles used in meta-analysis are in a large extent dissimilar to each other. Each of the research article has a different population and different control group. This makes the researches dissimilar and this may affect the quality of the conclusions.

The other limitation associated with meta-analysis is the potential for publication bias. This is also called the “file drawer problem.” According to Esterhuizen & Thabane (2016), the studies that showed no effect or were not statistically significant are not likely to be published and therefore do not appear in meta-analyses, which sometimes only search the published literature. This means that these studies are not considered when carrying out meta-analysis. These studies may be influential in the particular research being contacted and they may provide essential information about the research. Failure to include such studies may result into making biased conclusions or making conclusions which are not fully backed up by the real data.

The other limitation associated with meta-analysis which is used in this research is the quality of included studies. If the quality of the selected research articles is low the wrong impression is likely to be created during the process of evaluation and analysis of the data. A meta-analysis may be well done but with poor quality research articles and thus, the results yielded are likely to be invalid. The bias in primary studies is a major problem for any meta-analysis being conducted. If the statistical analysis used in the primary study is faulty, then the results will also be faulty (Esterhuizen & Thabane, 2016). This directly limits the quality of the conclusions made for the current study.

This study may also be limited by the number of studies used in the meta-analysis. In this research paper, five research articles were analyzed and the results were used to make the final conclusion. This may be a major limitation. Analyzing five research papers may fail to give the exact state of case being investigated. Each of the research papers used also majored on a particular aspect of mental health like depression and stress. If the impact of friends and relatives is different for different mental health disorders, then the research conclusions may be limited.   

                                                                   References

Esterhuizen, T. M., & Thabane, L. (2016). Con: Meta-analysis: some key limitations and potential solutions. Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, 31(6), 882-885.