The stepped wedge design is particularly useful when it is not feasible to provide the intervention to everyone or every community at once, and for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions that have been shown to be efficacious in a more limited, research setting and are now being scaled up...
The stepped wedge research design is becoming increasingly popular, particularly in the field of implementation science. It is a form of cluster randomised controlled trial with unidirectional cross-over (normally from control to intervention). This trial design may be biased however because the effect...
The stepped wedge design is particularly useful when it is not feasible to provide the intervention to everyone or every community at once, and for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions that have been shown to be efficacious in a more limited, research setting and are now being scaled up...
Stepped wedge trials have been used with increasing frequency in health research. For the cross-sectional form of this design, the within-cluster correlation is typically accommodated in the analysis using a random intercept linear mixed model, implying a constant correlation between measurements of any...
This motivating example provides a context for the theoretical and simulation results shown in Section 3 where we describe statistical aspects of the design and analysis of stepped wedge CRTs. In Section 4 we summarize our findings and discuss future areas of research....
In the final design, individuals are recruited in continuous time as they become eligible and experience either the control or intervention condition, but not both, and then provide an outcome measurement at follow-up. While most stepped wedge trials use simple randomisation, stratification and ...
The stepped wedge CRCT design has been mainly used for evaluating interventions during routine implementation, particularly for interventions that have been shown to be effective in more controlled research settings, or where there is lack of evidence of effectiveness but there is a strong belief that...
In contrast, there is little research available pertaining to the design and analysis of multi-arm stepped-wedge cluster randomized trials, utilized to evaluate the effectiveness of multiple experimental interventions. In this paper, we address this by explaining how the required sample size in these...
Conclusion: These stepped wedge design variations offer alternative methods for studying two interventions using a cluster-randomized trial. The selection of the appropriate variants should be driven by the research question with consideration given to the trade-off in number of steps, number of ...
All articles, conference abstracts, protocols and trial registrations of original randomised research studies that used or planned to use a stepped wedge design, from any field of research, were eligible. We excluded studies retrospectively analysed as a stepped wedge design when the study was not ...