[R-meta] rma.mv for studies reporting composite of and/or individual subscales

[Timothy MacKenzie]

Dear All,

In my meta-analysis, I've faced two issues.

First issue; each study can measure the same outcome using subscales
reported in the following ways:

(a) Some studies report only separate subscales,
(b) Some studies report only composite of some subscales,
(c) Some studies report both composite of and separate subscales.

Second issue; the same subscales don't quite occur across different
studies (indeed, the number of unique subscales is about the number of
studies).

To tackle the first issue, can I include only studies that report
separate subscales from (a) and (c) studies?

To tackle the second issue, can I only rely on the model below (data
structure is below)?

 rma.mv(es ~ 1, random = ~ 1 | study / obs, subset = subscale  == "subscale")

Thank you,
Tim M

My data looks like this (please view this in a plain text editor):

study subscale  reporting  obs
1        A      subscale   1
1        A      subscale   2
1        B      subscale   3
1        B      subscale   4
2        A&C    composite  5
3        G&H    composite  6
4        Z      subscale   7
4        T      subscale   8
4        Z&T    composite  9