What outcome do you want from your consultation?  This depends a bit on where you are in the process.

In the design stage, you want an efficient design in terms of time and money that takes subject knowledge into account and that will answer your research question with a high degree of probability.

If you are planning the design, here is what you want to get as an outcome from the statistical consultation or perhaps over several consultations:

• A design that addresses your research hypotheses.

• Alternative designs that also address your research hypotheses.

• An outline of how to carry out the design.

• The basic outline of the statistical analysis that will be performed  on the data.

If you are at the end, you essentially want a statistical analysis plan.

• Statistical analysis plan.

• Implementation details such as the packages to be used or the  programming language to be used.

You might also want help performing some specific statistical analysis or several statistical analyses.  This could take the form of coaching to perform the analysis yourself, giving you some code snippets so you can do the coding yourself, or even carrying out a limited bit of analysis that you can then plan to extend or repeat cookie-cutter fashion.

If you are being coached, you probably want the statistical analysis exactly specified so you can do the work correctly.

Or, you may want the statistician to actually perform the statistical analysis for  you.  Then, you should plan to have:

• An estimate of the billable time as well as the calendar time that  will be needed.

• An agreement on what communication needs to take place and when,  such as handing off finalized data sets.

• The actual statistical analysis output result.

• Ideally, the code that was used to produce the analysis.

• A copy of the data that were actually analyzed.

• An outline or synopsis of the results at a minimum.

• Some sample verbiage for the Statistical Methods section, the  Results section, and potentially the Discussion section.

All right.  Well, to be honest, this is when most people come to the statistician, because they are now having trouble due to their lack of planning.

And, this is the hardest time to help you.  After all, nothing can be changed.  You already designed the study and collected the data.  In the worst case, the data you collected will be worthless for actually answering your research question!

Now is not the time to be coy.  You need to lay all your cards on the table so that you can get effective help to move forward as efficiently as possible.

So, you need to provide the following to the statistician:

• At least minimal background on the subject of the study.

• A clear explanation of your research hypotheses.

• A concise summary of the design of the study.

• A description of how the study actually went.

• A way of looking at the data structure.

The last point in some ways is most important.    This can often be accomplished by simply bringing the data along for display on a laptop or having a printout of the data.  In cases where there is too much data to print, it could still be useful to print out at least a page or two of data.

For a statistician, looking at data is pleasurable, perhaps even more so than talking with you, so do not worry about boring anyone.   More seriously, though, since the data are where the rubber meets the road for statisticians, having the ability to review the data structure is going to enable a much more focused and useful conversation to take place.