This is a continuation of a long topic, addressed by post number rather than by page. Start at post 1.
Critical appraisal template: (1) What did the trial set out to estimate? (2) Could the design answer that question? (3) Was the population sufficiently similar to your population to apply the results? (4) What was the absolute effect, not just the relative one? (5) What are the two strongest criticisms available?
The short answer was in the first line; everything after is the working.
Post #61 is right about the mechanism and I think understates the practical bit.
The baseline characteristics table is the single most useful page for the questions that get asked here, because it tells you who the result applies to.
The right answer here may simply be that it has not been measured.
I read post #61 twice before replying, because I had assumed the opposite.
Sessions on negative or null results are consistently the most instructive and the hardest to get anyone to attend.
I am describing what is, rather than arguing for what should be.
Same experience here, different supplier, so it is at least not unique to one of them.
Agreed on STEP 4, with one qualification that I think matters. The reasoning holds for the case as described. Change the starting assumption and it does not, and the starting assumption is the part nobody states.
The most common failure mode is spending fifty minutes on the effect size and ten on the population. Reversing that ratio would improve most sessions.
Post #68 is the version of this I will quote in future. One addition.
Where the group cannot agree, record the disagreement rather than resolving it by seniority. The recorded disagreement is more honest and more useful later.
A qualification I should have led with rather than closed on.
Confirming post #72 from a second method, which matters more than confirming it from a second person.
Reading order that works for these sessions: registry entry, methods, baseline table, primary result, then abstract last. Reading the abstract first anchors everything that follows.
I had written a reply contradicting post #75 and deleted it. Here is what survived.
The figures usually contain the finding and the text usually contains the interpretation. Separating them for the first twenty minutes is a discipline worth keeping.
That is the shape of it. The detail is where I would expect to be corrected.
I would be cautious about generalising from the STEP 4 example above. It is a good example. It is one example.
What I would check first on STEP 4 is whether the thing being measured moved or whether the way of measuring it moved. Those look identical in a graph.
The most common failure mode is spending fifty minutes on the effect size and ten on the population. Reversing that ratio would improve most sessions.
Where I part company with post #80, and it is a narrow parting.
Reading this STEP 4 thread as someone who came in with a fixed view: the third and seventh replies moved me and the confident ones did not.
Sessions on negative or null results are consistently the most instructive and the hardest to get anyone to attend.
Adding this to the thread rather than to the wiki, because I am not confident enough for the wiki.
Narrowing post #83, because the general version has more than one answer.
Whatever the answer on STEP 4 turns out to be, the method for getting there is the same: state the assumption, do the arithmetic in public, invite the correction.
Second this, and I would have said it less carefully.
The baseline characteristics table is the single most useful page for the questions that get asked here, because it tells you who the result applies to.
That is the version I would defend. It is not the version I started with.
On post #88 — agreed on the reasoning, with one qualification.
A conflict-of-interest statement is worth reading aloud and is worth very little as a predictor. Design quality is what to spend the session on.
The version of STEP 4 that I was taught turned out to be a teaching simplification. Useful, and not true in the way I had assumed it was.