Quality of reporting of randomized clinical trials in abstracts of the 2005 annual meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

Objective: To determine the quality of abstracts reporting randomized clinical trials (RCT) at the 2005 Annual Scientific Meeting of the American College of Rheumatology.

Methods: All 2005 abstracts including late-breaking abstracts were assessed. An abstract was deemed to be reporting an RCT if it indicated that participants were randomized in the title or body of the abstract. RCT were excluded if they included only pharmacokinetic data. The CONSORT checklist was applied and relevant data extracted. We defined manufacturer support as acknowledgment of industry support or industry employee as co-author.

Results: Of 2146 abstracts, 143 (6.7%) reported RCT. Of these, 78.3% were drug trials, and 63.6% indicated manufacturer support. Only 30.8% of abstracts used "randomized" in the title, 44.1% did not explicitly state whether blinding was undertaken, and only 7.0% clearly stated who was blinded. Thirty percent of studies did not give an explicit definition of eligibility criteria of participants. While 84.6% explicitly described the experimental intervention, only 37.1% explicitly described the comparator intervention. Only 21% explicitly stated that an intention to treat analysis was performed. Baseline demographic and clinical characteristics were reported in 48.3%. While most abstracts reported summary results for each treatment group, only 35.7% reported effect size with its precision.

Conclusion: The quality of reporting is suboptimal in many RCT abstracts. Abstracts reporting RCT would benefit from a structured approach that ensures more detailed reporting of eligibility criteria, active and comparator interventions, flow of participants, and adequate summary and precision of results.

An update of Murrayan needs: A pilot study among American college students

Much research work on motives has been based on the taxonomy of psychogenic needs originally proposed by Murray and his colleagues in 1938. However, many of these needs have received little attention, and some of them may be less relevant now than they were 70 years ago. Two studies were conducted to investigate current motives. In Study 1, we used the Striving Assessment to elicit the personal strivings of 255 undergraduate university students. Murray’s taxonomy was unable to account for 50% of the 2,937 strivings. These strivings were thematically groups into 11 new categories and combined with 7 Murrayan needs to form the Comprehensive Motivation Coding System (CMCS). In Study 2, Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) stories produced by 143 undergraduate student participants were coded by these two systems. Murray’s system was unable to fully account for 42% of motives identified in the TAT stories, but the CMCS was able to account for 89%. These findings suggest that Murrayan needs may not adequately describe contemporary motivations and that the CMCS has the potential to do so. However, due to the limited demographics of our sample, further investigations are needed.

Elaborative relational structures in the research prose of sociology : an intercultural study

This paper investigates elaborative relational structures utilised by native English speaking and native Polish speaking scholars in sociology research articles written in English. The examined texts have been produced in American, Australian and Polish academic discourse communities. The study utilised the framework of the analysis of the rhetorical structure of tests (FARS) as an analytical tool (Golebiowski 2009, 2011). The following types of elaboration relations are discussed : amplification, extension, reformulation, explanation, instantiation and addition. Elaboration is analysed with respect to its textual function, frequency of employment, hierarchical location, recursiveness, discoursal prominence and explicitness. The elaborative systems in the examined texts are shown to be complex, with pervasive presence of multi-stage recursive structures. It is suggested that elaborativeness may be a general characteristic of the style of writing sociology, which, as a relatively new discipline, requires establishing of wide grounds for the proposed claims, where writers persuade their readers not only of the specific claims of their text, but also of frameworks of thought in which the claims are placed. It is hypothesized that the similarities in the elaborativeness across texts result from the shared stylistic conventions and traditions of the disciplinary research community of sociology, while differences in the mode of employment of elaboration relations are attributed to cultural norms and conventions as well as educational systems prevailing within the discourse communities constituting the social contexts of the studied texts.
Golebiowski, Z. (2011). Scholarly criticism across discourse communities. In Salager-Meyer, Françoise and Lewin, Beverly A. (eds), Crossed words : Criticism in scholarly writing, pp. 203-224, Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, Berlin, Germany.
Golebiowski Z. (2009). The use of contrastive strategies in a sociology research paper: A cross-cultural study. In Suomela-Salmi, Eija and Dervin, Fred (eds), Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives on academic discourse, pp. 165-186, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Philadelphia.

The relationships between insomnia, sleep apnoea and depression: findings from the American National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2005-2008.

Objective: To determine the association between insomnia, obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), and comorbid insomnia- OSA and depression, while controlling for relevant lifestyle and health factors, among a large population-based sample of US adults. Method: We examined a sample of 11,329 adults (≥18 years) who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) during the years 2005-2008. Insomnia was classified via a combination of self-reported positive physician diagnosis and high-frequency 'trouble falling asleep', 'waking during the night', 'waking too early', and 'feeling unrested during the day'. OSA was classified as a combination of a positive response to a physician-diagnosed condition, in addition to a high frequency of self-reported nocturnal 'snoring', 'snorting/stopping breathing' and 'feeling overly sleepy during the day'. Comorbid insomnia-OSA was further assessed by combining a positive response to either insomnia (all), or sleep apnoea (all), as classified above. Depressive symptomology was assessed by the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), with scores of >9 used to indicate depression. Odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for sleep disorders and depression were attained from logistic regression modelling adjusted for sex, age, poverty level, smoking status and body mass index (BMI). Results: Those who reported insomnia, OSA or comorbid insomnia-OSA symptoms reported higher rates of depression (33.6%, 22.2%, 27.1%, respectively), and consistently reported poorer physical health outcomes than those who did not report sleep disorders. After adjusting for sex, age, poverty level, smoking status and BMI (kg/m2), insomnia (OR 6.57, 95% CI 3.89-11.11), OSA (OR 5.14, 95% CI 3.14-8.41) and comorbid insomnia-OSA (OR 6.67, 95% CI 4.44-10.00) were associated with an increased likelihood of reporting depression. © The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists 2014.