# Is it valid to do confirmatory factor analysis on correlation coefficients derived from a meta-analysis?

I have just read a paper in which the authors performed a meta-analysis to extract correlation coefficients (specifically between five personality variables and emotional intelligence). They then used confirmatory factor analysis to test if all the variables involved formed a higher-order factor (specifically a general factor of personality correlated with EI). The total number of samples was 128; these were also broken down into subsamples, as there are various measures of EI (k ranged from 18 to 45). I was wondering if it is valid to use CFA in this way, particularly with such small subsamples? Specifically, one of the analyses they reported in detail was k = 22 and there were six variables with fifteen inter-correlations in the analysis. Would their results be meaningful, or are they over-interpreting the data?

In a meta-analysis, $k$ typically refers to the number of correlation coefficients that were meta-analyzed. An aggregated coefficient could therefore be based on thousands of individual observations. So, no, without knowing more about this particular paper, there is nothing here to indicate problems with this.