On the bias of science: more on methods

Actually I could probably spend the next six months writing a book about this, but this will be my last post on methods, at least for a while, because I want to move on to the remaining sections of the generic research paper. I ' m going to focus specifically on research involving psychiatric diagnoses, but much of what I will say applies more broadly to any sort of question in which people ' s subjective experiences are variables. That ' s a whole lot of published research in psychology, social science, and medicine.The culture of science strongly favors quantification, which means counting, and in order to count phenomena, you first need to classify them. So if I ' m doing research that concerns, say, depression or anxiety disorder, I need to be able to label people as having those disorders and maybe measure their severity. A big problem in psychiatry -- it ' s dirty not so secret -- is that nobody knows what causes psychiatric disorders and even whether two people who get the same diagnostic label actually have the same " disease, " if that ' s the word for it.  Most medical diagnoses correspond to some specific physical findings that can be established, if not with absolute certainty, at least with a known degree of accuracy. We can culture the pathogenic infectious organism, count the leukocytes, see the abnormal cells under the microscope. Psychiatric diagnoses aren ' t like that. Diagnosticians have to interview people, and they make the diagnosis based on p...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs