| Methods |
Design: five group parallel trial
Purpose: to examine the effect of social skills training on the interpersonal interaction of chronic psychiatric patients |
| Participants |
Patients: chronic psychiatric in‐patients
Baseline comparability: probably (stratified by level of daily interaction) |
| Interventions |
Placebo: sessions with transactional game followed by lectures by the therapist
Untreated: no sessions
Experimental:
‐sessions with social skills training (role playing)
‐sessions with incentive condition (re‐enforcement by reward)
‐combination
(Co‐intervention: yes, most patients received psychotropic drugs; type, dose and group distribution NS) |
| Outcomes |
% alone: the % of the time the individual was observed more than 4 feet away from another person.
% silent: the % of the time the person was silent in a group discussion |
| Notes |
Relevant outcome data not accessible |
| Risk of bias |
| Bias |
Authors' judgement |
Support for judgement |
| Adequate sequence generation? |
Unclear risk |
NS |
| Allocation concealment? |
Unclear risk |
NS |
| Blinding?
Treatment provider |
High risk |
Not described as double‐blind (placebo/social skills training) |
| Blinding?
Outcome assessor |
Low risk |
'The observers were blind to both the nature of the dependent variable to be extracted from their recordings and the group assignments...' |
| Incomplete outcome data addressed?
All outcomes |
High risk |
Drop‐out > 15% or NS |
| Free of selective reporting? |
High risk |
Relevant outcome data not accessible |
| Free of other bias? |
Low risk |
|
| Trial size > 49? |
High risk |
N = 20 |
| Clearly concealed allocation + trial size > 49 + drop‐out max 15% |
High risk |
Trial size < 49 |
