Assessing Change in Intervention Research: The Benefits of Composite Outcomes

Intervention research is often time- and resource-intensive, with numerous participants involved over extended periods of time. In order to maximize the value of intervention studies, multiple outcome measures are often included, either to ensure a diverse set of outcomes is being assessed or to refine assessments of specific outcomes. In the paper, we advocate for combining assessments, rather than relying on individual measures assessed separately, to better evaluate the effectiveness of interventions. Specifically, we argue that by pooling information from individual measures into a single outcome, composite scores can provide finer estimates of the underlying theoretical construct of interest, while retaining important properties more sophisticated methods often forego, such as transparency and interpretability.

Shiny app: https://kwiebels.shinyapps.io/Multiple_outcomes_in_interventions/

干预研究通常耗时且资源密集，涉及众多参与者并在较长的时间内进行。为了最大化干预研究的价值，通常会包含多个结果指标，要么是为了确保评估的是多样化的结果集，要么是为了细化对特定结果的评估。在本文中，我们主张将评估相结合，而非依赖单独分别评估的指标，以更好地评估干预措施的有效性。具体而言，我们认为通过将单个指标的信息汇总为单一结果，综合评分可以提供对感兴趣的理论构念的更精细估计，同时保留了更为复杂的方法通常所忽视的重要属性，如透明度和可解释性。