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The sleeper effect: Artifact or phenomenon - A brief comment on Bell et al. (2013)

Flückiger, Christoph; Del Re, A C; Wampold, Bruce E (2015). The sleeper effect: Artifact or phenomenon - A brief comment on Bell et al. (2013). Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 83(2):438-442.

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Bell, Marcus, and Goodlad (2013) recently conducted a meta-analysis of randomized controlled additive trials and found that adding an additional component to an existing treatment vis-à-vis the existing treatment produced larger effect sizes on targeted outcomes at 6-months follow-up than at termination, an effect they labeled as a sleeper effect. One of the limitations with Bell et al.'s detection of the sleeper effect was that they did not conduct a statistical test of the size of the effect at follow-up versus termination.

METHOD: To statistically test if the differences of effect sizes between the additive conditions and the control conditions at follow-up differed from those at termination, we used a restricted maximum-likelihood random-effect model with known variances to conduct a multilevel longitudinal meta-analysis (k = 30).

RESULTS: Although the small effects at termination detected by Bell et al. were replicated (ds = 0.17-0.23), none of the analyses of growth from termination to follow-up produced statistically significant effects (ds < 0.08; p > .20), and when asymmetry was considered using trim-and-fill procedure or the studies after 2000 were analyzed, magnitude of the sleeper effect was negligible (d = 0.00).

CONCLUSION: There is no empirical evidence to support the sleeper effect

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, further contribution
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Psychology
Dewey Decimal Classification:150 Psychology
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Clinical Psychology
Health Sciences > Psychiatry and Mental Health
Language:English
Date:April 2015
Deposited On:06 Mar 2017 12:16
Last Modified:17 Oct 2024 01:35
Publisher:American Psychological Association
ISSN:0022-006X
OA Status:Closed
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037220
PubMed ID:25822243
Project Information:
  • Funder: SNSF
  • Grant ID: PZ00P1_136937
  • Project Title: Microtuning a bonafide treatment for GAD patients - A randomized controlled trial
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