Comparison of registered and published intervention fidelity assessment in cluster randomised trials of public health interventions in low- and middle-income countries: systematic review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Cluster randomised trials (CRTs) are a key instrument to evaluate public health interventions. Fidelity assessment examines study processes to gauge whether an intervention was delivered as initially planned. Evaluation of implementation fidelity (IF) is required to establish whether the measured effects of a trial are due to the intervention itself and may be particularly important for CRTs of complex interventions conducted in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, current CRT reporting guidelines offer no guidance on IF assessment. The objective of this review was to study current practices concerning the assessment of IF in CRTs of public health interventions in LMICs. METHODS: CRTs of public health interventions in LMICs that planned or reported IF assessment in either the trial protocol or the main trial report were included. The MEDLINE/PubMed, CINAHL and EMBASE databases were queried from January 2012 to May 2016. To ensure availability of a study protocol, CRTs reporting a registration number in the abstract were included. Relevant data were extracted from each study protocol and trial report by two researchers using a predefined screening sheet. Risk of bias for individual studies was assessed. RESULTS: We identified 90 CRTs of public health interventions in LMICs with a study protocol in a publicly available trial registry published from January 2012 to May 2016. Among these 90 studies, 25 (28%) did not plan or report assessing IF; the remaining 65 studies (72%) addressed at least one IF dimension. IF assessment was planned in 40% (36/90) of trial protocols and reported in 71.1% (64/90) of trial reports. The proportion of overall agreement between the trial protocol and trial report concerning occurrence of IF assessment was 66.7% (60/90). Most studies had low to moderate risk of bias. CONCLUSIONS: IF assessment is not currently a systematic practice in CRTs of public health interventions carried out in LMICs. In the absence of IF assessment, it may be difficult to determine if CRT results are due to the intervention design, to its implementation, or to unknown or external factors that may influence results. CRT reporting guidelines should promote IF assessment. TRIAL REGISTRATION: Protocol published and available at: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13643-016-0351-0.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | Metaresearch Domain: Reporting · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | low |
| gpt | Metaresearch Domain: Reporting · Genre: Review About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Systematic review | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.405 | 0.190 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.023 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".