Monitor It Well Posted on March 19, 2007 Judy Garber (bio) talks about the issue of standardizing across sites.

The thing about multi-sites is the standardization across sites. You have to make sure you're all doing things the same way. You have to make sure that you've got, so if you're doing assessments that your reliabilities are good. If you're doing interventions that you've got good fidelity.

So that's one of the challenges. You have to make sure that you're training people to the same level. We have in one of my multi-sites we have weekly phone calls with all the PIs and our staff, the project coordinators have weekly phone calls so you really kind of monitor it pretty closely.

The way you standardize is you have a protocol, again depending on whether you're talking about an intervention or an assessment. If it's an assessment, if you're doing psychiatric interviews you follow the interviews, you get reliabilities, you get within site reliabilities and across site reliabilities. And try to check those as often as you can, get feedback and try to correct any problems that you're having.

With regard to interventions, it's important to have checks on the fidelity, are people doing it, but you also need to have supervision along the way. Again, within site and then an overall supervisor who can kind of check and say okay, yeah, we're all doing it the way we think it should be done. So I think it's just monitoring it and monitoring it well.

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