Researching Persons with Mental Illness (Applied Social Research Methods)

Can the mentally ill be interviewed? What kind of reliability can be expected in their responses? What about the ethics of informed consent? Although standard social science methodologies have been used successfully to study mental health, researching issues with mentally ill individuals introduces unique theoretical and methodological issues. This pathbreaking volume alerts researchers to ways of dealing with the special problems of research in this field. Focusing on the study of mentally ill adults at the individual level of analysis, the book explores such topics as: how theories of human behaviour that have been developed for a general population may have limited applicability to the population under study; how symptoms are defined and measured; ways to plan and implement research; uses of alternative data sources such as clinical charts; and the issues of research in multi-disciplinary settings.