McLeroy to serve on international CONSORT review committee

Regents and Distinguished Professor Kenneth McLeroy, Ph.D., of the Texas A&M Health Science Center School of Rural Public Health was recently invited to participate in an international initiative to develop a new reporting guideline for randomized controlled trials of social and psychological interventions. The Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) review committee initiative is funded by the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council.

As demonstrated by previous CONSORT guidelines, the development of an evidence-based reporting guideline for social and psychological intervention randomized controlled trials should improve the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and transparency of study reports. This, in turn, promises to improve the critical appraisal of research and its use in policy and practice decision making.

This research project will be conducted in five phases.The first phase was the project launch, which consisted of the establishment of a Project Executive and International Advisory Group, and recruitment of journal editors and the CONSORT Group. The second phase involves a Delphi process that will generate a list of possible items to include in the CONSORT Extension. Next, there will be a formal consensus meeting to select the reporting items to add to, or modify for, the CONSORT-SPI Extension. Fourth, guideline documents will be written, including an explanation and elaboration document that will provide detailed advice for each item and examples of good reporting. The final phase will comprise guideline dissemination, with simultaneous publication and endorsement of the guideline in multiple journals, endorsement by funding agencies, presentations at conferences and other meetings, and a dedicated website that will facilitate feedback about the guideline.