Spurious prospective associations between unemployment and wellbeing: Reanalysis of a meta-analytic cross-lagged panel analysis

A recent meta-analytic cross-lagged panel analysis proposed that wellbeing and unemployment had reciprocal prospective effects on each other. However, it is known that cross-lagged effects on subsequent measures of an outcome variable while adjusting for prior measurements of the outcome may be spurious due to correlations with residuals and regression to the mean rather than due to true increasing or decreasing effects. The present reanalyses of the same meta-analytic data as in the challenged study found the cross-lagged effects between unemployment and wellbeing to be spurious. Cross-lagged effects while adjusting for an initial score on the outcome often do not prove anything over and above a cross-sectional correlation, which may be due to confounding, combined with less than perfect reliability in measurements. This limitation is important for researchers to bear in mind in order not to overinterpret findings.