Unfair comparison

Unreliable assessment of outcomes

Be careful with outcomes that were not assessed reliably in treatment comparisons.

Some outcomes are easy to assess, such as number of speech sounds a child can correctly produce or the number of times a child initiated interaction with a peer in a given time frame. Others are more difficult, such as assessing someone’s quality of life. For intervention comparisons to be meaningful, outcomes that are meaningful to people should be assessed using methods that have been shown to be reliable.

REMEMBER: Think about whether outcomes were assessed using methods that have been shown to be reliable.