No abstract

The current report discusses only one aspect of the information-retrieval process: the recollection of age of onset of psychiatric disorders in epidemiological surveys. Age-of-onset information is often collected in clinical interviews as part of the history-taking process and is used along with other retrospective information about course and family history to build up an initial understanding of the nature of the disorder being treated. Exact dating is generally not critical here, although it is useful to know the general life stage in which symptoms first occurred. In cases where there is an interest in establishing the importance of a triggering event, however, accurate dating of age of onset in relation to a presumed precipitant becomes more important. In cases where there is an interest in distinguishing primary and secondary comorbidity, furthermore, accurate comparative age-of-onset information is needed to distinguish between temporally primary and secondary disorders.Precise age-of-onset information is more important in epidemiological surveys that focus on lifetime disorders. Retrospective age-of-onset reports are used in such surveys to estimate survival curves and synthetic cohort effects (such as Fombonne, 1994 of-onset reports than those obtained a decade earlier in the Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) Study. The test-retest consistency of age-of-onset reports was also higher in the NCS than the ECA. Despite these improvements, considerable inconsistency in age-of-onset reports remains in the NCS test-retest data. The paper closes with a discussion of potentially promising future directions to improve retrospective age-of-onset reports in new psychiatric epidemiological surveys.Key words: age of onset, major depression, accuracy, autobiographical memory, diagnostic interview, epidemiology surveys International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, Volume 8, Number 1All psychiatric diagnostic interviews use retrospective information of one sort or another. They differ, though, in the length of the recall period and in the relative importance of information about the present and the past. Clinical intake interviews, for example, are primarily concerned with current complaints, but they interpret these complaints in the context of retrospective reports about history. Community epidemiological risk factor surveys, in comparison, are usually concerned with lifetime prevalence, whereas needs assessment surveys are usually concerned with prevalence over a time interval used for administrative planning, such as the last six months or year.In all of these cases, the clinician or researcher needs to develop strategies for eliciting information that is as accurate as possible about the past. Success in this task requires an understanding of how information is stored in memory and of how successful memory retrieval operates. It requires questioning strategies that use these understandings to help respondents maximize their information retrieval capabilities. And it requires an appreciation of the limi...

No abstract

An important mark of professional competence is a sophisticated and critical attitude toward the procedures that are used in the performance of professional functions. The best examples of social research have increasingly exhibited this attitude both in the reports of particular projects and in special research inquiries aimed primarily at testing and improving the research procedures that are in common use. It would seem that the greatest progress has been made in the development of scales of measurement and sampling procedures, but important progress has also been made in tests of the validity of the data produced by surveys and other research inquiries.