Wang 2005.

Methods	Parallel randomised controlled trial.
Participants	Participants: families of children with autism. Sex: both mothers and fathers (no further information). Age of parents: biological mothers: mean 33.4 years intervention; 33.5 years control; biological fathers: mean 34.5 years intervention; 34.9 years control. Unit of allocation: individual family. Number randomised: 34 (17 intervention; 17 control). Number used in analysis: 27 Parental stress (15 intervention; 12 control) from Wang 2005 (thesis data). Country & setting: China; single‐site; recruited from community settings; intervention delivered in the community. Inclusion criteria: child <10 years old; formal diagnosis of autism by professionals or agencies not affiliated with the project. Exclusion criteria: not stated. Ethnicity: all Chinese. Baseline characteristics: 33% parents had no previous training on autism; the other 66% had received some form of training from an education service centre that included behaviour management, language instruction and applied behaviour analysis.
Interventions	Two conditions: Interactive skills of parents programme (behavioural parenting programme); wait‐list control. Duration of intervention: 4 weeks. Duration of trial: 5 weeks. Length of follow‐up: none.
Outcomes	Stress (Parenting Stress Index).
Notes
Risk of bias
Bias	Authors' judgement	Support for judgement
Random sequence generation (selection bias)	Low risk	Information from trial investigator (e‐mail from P Wang to CB on 31 Oct 2010) states "randomisation was completed via coin flipping".
Allocation concealment (selection bias)	High risk	No allocation concealment was attempted.
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) Participants	High risk	Review authors judge that it would not be possible to fully blind participants in this type of study, and found no indication of any specific additional measures taken to reduce the risk of bias that might result from differential behaviours by participants.
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) Personnel	High risk	Principal investigator delivered the training and also assessed the outcomes.
Blinding (performance bias and detection bias) Outcome assessors	High risk	Principal investigator delivered the training and also assessed the outcomes.
Incomplete outcome data (attrition bias) All outcomes	Low risk	There was missing outcome data: "after commencement of the study, two families dropped out of the training group and five dropped out of the control group, leaving 15 families remaining in the training group and 12 in the control group. One of the families in the training group, after completing the entire training program, dropped out during the posttest data collection phase because of a prescheduled family vacation.’ (p.97, col 2)."
Selective reporting (reporting bias)	Low risk	Review authors judge that the published report includes all expected outcomes, including those that were pre‐specified.
Other bias	Low risk	The study appears to be free of other sources of bias.