CONSORT Extensions for Development Effectiveness: guidelines for the reporting of randomised control trials of social and economic policy interventions in developing countries

Abstract

The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) checklist was developed to assist investigators, authors, reviewers, and journal editors provide the necessary information to be included in reports of controlled medical trials. We augment the CONSORT reporting by adapting and elaborating the checklist to the context of trials of development interventions. We call this revised list the CONSORT Extensions for Development Effectiveness (CEDE). This checklist emphasises the reporting of underlying theories and descriptions of intervention and comparison conditions, research design, and detailed discussion of the protocol to mitigate the threats to the randomised evaluation design of studies. Systematising, and greater transparency, in the reporting formats for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) will enable the community of evaluators, policy-makers, and programme officers to be privy to the many steps in an RCT implementation, and to better judge the internal and external validity of specific RCTs, both absolutely and relative to other methods of evaluation. The CEDE checklist is not meant to be the basis for evaluation of the RCT methodology, but to promote better reporting of data from published and completed studies. These guidelines should evolve alongside the state of the art of the field of experimental trial designs for the evaluation of social and economic policy interventions.