Results Summary and Professional Abstract
Final Research Report
View this project's final research report.
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Widespread Implementation of a Patient-Centered Online Therapy for Adolescent Traumatic Brain Injury
Journal Articles
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Peer-Review Summary
Peer review of PCORI-funded research helps make sure the report presents complete, balanced, and useful information about the research. It also assesses how the project addressed PCORI’s Methodology Standards. During peer review, experts read a draft report of the research and provide comments about the report. These experts may include a scientist focused on the research topic, a specialist in research methods, a patient or caregiver, and a healthcare professional. These reviewers cannot have conflicts of interest with the study.
The peer reviewers point out where the draft report may need revision. For example, they may suggest ways to improve descriptions of the conduct of the study or to clarify the connection between results and conclusions. Sometimes, awardees revise their draft reports twice or more to address all of the reviewers’ comments.
Peer reviewers commented, and the researchers made changes or provided responses. The comments and responses included the following:
- Reviewers questioned whether study participants received the same level of therapist involvement in the face-to-face and the therapist-guided online delivery of family problem solving treatment. The researchers confirmed that participants spent an equivalent amount of time in both delivery conditions with the therapist, reviewing content and developing plans to address their problems. The researchers revised the report to clarify this fact.
- Reviewers asked for additional substantiation for the criterion that attendance at 3 or more sessions out of 10-14 in the face-to-face condition constituted program participation. The researchers explained that three sessions were sufficient for the family to receive training in cognitive reframing and problem-solving skills, the focus of the treatment. As additional confirmation, the researchers ran their analysis model with sessions completed as a continuous variable and found no significant differences based on the number of sessions completed.
- Reviewers asked that the report better address how the researchers handled missing data in analyses. The researchers revised the analytical and statistical approaches portion of the methods section to explain that when they examined the utility of multiple imputation to account for missing data, they found minimal differences between the models with and without multiple imputation for the primary outcomes. Given that multiple imputation on repeated measures of outcomes fails to capture time-specific orderings also, the researchers used mixed models without imputation.
- Reviewers asked how the researchers determined that the effect size of 0.5 indicated a minimally clinically important difference (MCID) for the primary outcomes. The researchers explained the 0.5 was equivalent to half a standard deviation change on the primary outcome measures, which is the MCID seen in many clinical studies.
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