Co-producing reporting guidelines for targeted learning studies

24th February 2023

There has been well publicised problems with reproducible and transparent reporting from observational data based research studies. This is a particular issue once machine learning gets involved, come due to the complexity.

Many of the studies that are published would be difficult to reproduce, even by the research team themselves. Therefore today we had a workshop with two lived experience expert researchers, an additional lived experience expert and myself. Together we went through the draft reporting guidance we have been creating for targeted learning studies.

This was a very useful exercise and helped harness lay researcher and lived experience into the guidance. This was important not just for making plans of analysis and protocols available publicly before analysis starts. It was also important in thinking about how results are reported and disseminated and the role of lived experience experts in this process.

These guidelines were intended to build on some guidance already created around developing a protocol for targeted learning studies (Gruber et al., 2022). Hopefully this is a further step along the way to making sure that such studies are able to be replicated by independent research teams. This will help the evidence from such causal inference studies be more transparent and give further confidence to the results once they are publicised. This will also help once youth mental health researchers start using targeted learning to gain insights into the causal impact of different treatments and interventions.

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