Bronchiectasis develops early in the course of cystic fibrosis, being detectable in infants as young as 10 weeks of age, and is persistent and progressive. We sought to determine risk factors for the onset of bronchiectasis, using data collected by the Australian Respiratory Early Surveillance Team for Cystic Fibrosis (AREST CF) intensive surveillance program.

Observational longitudinal research is particularly useful for assessing etiology and prognosis and for providing evidence for clinical decision making. However, there are no structured reporting requirements for studies of this design to assist authors, editors, and readers. The authors developed and tested a checklist of criteria related to threats to the internal and external validity of observational longitudinal studies. The checklist criteria concerned recruitment, data collection, biases, and data analysis and descriptive issues relevant to study rationale, study population, and generalizability. Two raters independently assessed 49 randomly selected articles describing stroke research published from 1999 to 2003 in six journals: American Journal of Epidemiology, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Stroke, Annals of Neurology, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. On average, 17 of the 33 checklist criteria were reported. Criteria describing the study design were better reported than those related to internal validity. No relation was found between study type (etiologic or prognostic) or word count and quality of reporting. A flow diagram for summarizing participant flow through a study was developed. Editors and authors should consider using a checklist and flow diagram when reporting on observational longitudinal research.

To the Editor: Due to their lower rate of adverse events, acellular pertussis vaccines (diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis; DTaP) replaced whole cell vaccines (diphtheria-tetanus-whole cell pertussis; DTwP) in many developed countries during the 1990s. DTaP became available in Queensland, Australia, in 1996 and replaced DTwP for publicly funded primary course immunizations delivered at ages 2 months, 4 months, and 6 months in March 1999. This meant children born in 1998 could receive a primary course consisting of only DTwP, only DTaP, or a mixed schedule.

Research capacity building (RCB) in Australia has recently focussed on strategies that take a whole of system approach to developing research culture at individual, team and organisation levels. Although a theoretical framework exists, no tool has been published that quantitatively measures the effectiveness of RCB interventions aimed at these three levels. A sample of 134 allied health workers was used to validate the research capacity and culture (RCC) tool. Item level analysis was undertaken using Cronbach’s a and exploratory factor analysis, and test–retest reliability was examined using intra-class correlations (ICC). The tool had one factor emerge for each domain, with excellent internal consistency for organisation, team and individual domains (a = 0.95, 0.96 and 0.96 respectively; and factor loadings ranges of 0.58–0.89, 0.65–0.89 and 0.59–0.93 respectively). The overall mean score (total) for each domain was: 5.4 (inter-quartile range 3.9–7.7), 4.4 (IQR 2.6–6.1) and 3.9 (IQR 2.9–6) for the organisation, team and individual domains respectively. Test–retest reliability was strong for each domain: organisation ICC = 0.77, team ICC = 0.83 and individual ICC = 0.82. The RCC tool has three domains measuring research capacity and culture at organisation, team and individual levels. It demonstrates excellent internal consistency and strong test–retest reliability.