Abstract
:Reporting guidelines, such as the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) Statement, improve the reporting of research in the medical literature (Turner et al., 2012). Many such guidelines exist and the CONSORT Extension to Nonpharmacological Trials (Boutron et al., 2008) provides suitable guidance for reporting between-groups intervention studies in the behavioral sciences. The CONSORT Extension for N-of-1 Trials (CENT 2015) was developed for multiple crossover trials with single individuals in the medical sciences (Shamseer et al., 2015; Vohra et al., 2015), but there is no reporting guideline in the CONSORT tradition for single case research used in the behavioral sciences. We developed the Single Case Reporting guideline In BEhavioural interventions (SCRIBE) 2016 to meet this need. This statement article describes the methodology of the development of the SCRIBE 2016, along with the outcome of 2 Delphi surveys and a consensus meeting of experts. We present the resulting 26-item SCRIBE 2016 checklist. The article complements the more detailed SCRIBE 2016 explanation and elaboration article (Tate et al., 2016) that provides a rationale for each of the items and examples of adequate reporting from the literature. Both these resources will assist authors to prepare reports of single case research with clarity, completeness, accuracy, and transparency. They will also provide journal reviewers and editors with a practical checklist against which such reports may be critically evaluated.
Highlights
University courses generally prepare students of the behavioural sciences very well for research using parallel, between-group designs
The items remained unrevised for Round 2, which was conducted to elicit additional comment on the items. These decision-making criteria are compatible with that used in the development of the CONSORT Extension for N-of-1 Trials (CENT), which excluded items with mean importance ratings
We expect that the publication rate of single case experiments and the research into singlecase methodology will expand over the years, given the evidence of such a trend (e.g., Hammond & Gast, 2010) and considering the recent interest shown in journal publication of special issues dedicated to single-case designs research referred to earlier in this article
Summary
University courses generally prepare students of the behavioural sciences very well for research using parallel, between-group designs. Within each class of design the adequacy of such controls and whether or not the degree of experimental control meets design standards (see Horner et al, 2005; Kratochwill et al, 2013) vary considerably (cf A-B-A vs A-B-A-B; multiple-baseline designs with 2 vs 3 baselines/tiers) Reports of these designs in the literature have variable scientific quality and features of internal and external validity can be evaluated with scales measuring scientific robustness in single-case designs, such as described in Maggin et al (2014) and Tate et al. The structure of the four prototypical experimental designs in Figure 1 differ significantly: the withdrawal/reversal design systematically applies and withdraws an intervention in a sequential manner; the multiple-baseline design systematically applies an intervention in a sequential manner that has a staggered introduction across a particular parameter (e.g., participants, behaviours); the alternating-treatments design compares multiple interventions in a concurrent manner by rapidly alternating the application of the interventions; the changing-criterion design establishes a number of hierarchically-based criterion levels that are implemented in a sequential manner. The funds were used to employ the project manager, set up and develop a web-based survey, hold a consensus meeting, and sponsor participants to attend the consensus meeting
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