The Template for Intervention Description and Replication as a Measure of Intervention Reporting Quality: Rasch Analysis.
Marcel P Dijkers, Scott R Millis
PMID 33543082WHAT IT FOUND
A single score made from the TIDieR intervention reporting checklist cannot reliably rank how completely studies describe treatment.
It basically separates only good and poor reporting, so it should not be treated as a precise quality measure.
Key findings
01The TIDieR items worked well enough to be treated as a single reporting scale.
02The resulting summary score was a poor measure of reporting quality and basically separated only good and poor papers.
03Researchers should be careful about depending on the TIDieR summary score to compare reporting quality over time or across intervention areas.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The analysis depended on ratings made by 16 different secondary studies, and rater strictness may have influenced the scores. The authors recoded unclear, missing, or not applicable entries, and different coding choices could change the results. Only two secondary studies contributed comparator arm ratings, and one secondary study contributed combined arm ratings. At least 20 more studies that used TIDieR did not publish raw ratings, so the analysed set may be incomplete. The authors did not account for the fact that many primary papers came from the same secondary study. The study assumes reporting quality is a single trait that can be measured by this checklist, which may not be true.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the finding that the TIDieR items behave as a single scale as proof that the checklist's summary score can rank reporting quality precisely. The authors concluded the score is poor and basically separates only good and poor papers.