Selective Reporting of Results in a Systematic Review: A Critique of Ballester et al. (2021)

ABSTRACT

Ballester et al.’s (2021) Ballester and colleagues' review of family-based drug prevention programs has at least two fundamental methodological problems that bring its results, and the conclusions drawn from these, into question. The first problem concerns the use of brief narrative summaries of the results from each paper that do not always accurately describe the results reported. The second problem concerns the failure to adequately describe the assessment of various forms of bias present in each of the papers reviewed. These problems are illustrated by examining the way in which Ballester et al. assessed potential outcome reporting bias in the seven papers from evaluations of the Strengthening Families Program 10–14 (SFP 10–14) included in their review and the manner in which they selectively highlight positive results from these papers in their narrative summaries while ignoring results that support the null hypothesis of no effect.