Better Reporting of Communication Interventions: Using the TIDieR Checklist in Speech-language Pathology and Audiology
Complete reporting of communication-based interventions in speech-language pathology and audiology is paramount to the usability of evidence. Most researchers in the field do not use a checklist to describe interventions. A current scoping review of caregiver-implemented language interventions found inconsistent reporting of intervention components across the articles. It is therefore difficult to extract pertinent information. The American Speech-Language Hearing Association (ASHA) encourages publications in their journals to meet reporting guidelines and use a checklist to ensure all essential details are included in the published study. The 12-item Template for Intervention Description and Replication (TIDieR) checklist (Hoffmann et al., 2014) is an author tool developed to structure the descriptions of interventions and enhance their replicability. Allied health disciplines have used TIDieR to standardize the description of interventions and assess completeness of reporting; however, there are few examples of TIDieR applied to interventions within the field of speech-language pathology and audiology. I suggest TIDieR may be used to meet ASHA reporting standards. In this presentation, I describe in detail how the TIDieR checklist may be applied to the field to facilitate comprehensive intervention reporting in individual trials, protocols, and systematic reviews. This presentation includes a TIDieR reporting criteria adapted for speech-language pathology and audiology. I provide a tutorial that was developed through systematic application of TIDieR to child language interventions within the context of a scoping review. I recommend researchers use TIDieR to report each intervention implemented in their studies to aid in the evaluation of individual interventions and comparisons across them.