The Patient's Family: Research Methods

Multiple impact therapy : evaluation and design for future study

“…Two important criteria, relevance and standardization, are often viewed as competing in the design of observational methods (Drechsler & Shapiro, 1963;Haley, 1964;Levinger, 1963;Rabkin, 1965). Relevance means that the observational situation is either a natural one, such as in the family's home (O'Rourke, 1963), or a laboratory situation conceptually similar to a naturally occurring one (Strauss, 1970).…”

“…Though structuring the observations made it easier to compare data obtained from families, it created concern as to whether the situations observed were too artificial to have any meaning (Levinger, 1963;Rabkin, 1965;Vidich, 1956). For example, Rabkin suggested that whereas real situations are complex and filled with ambiguities, the experimental ones were usually rather simple, rarely containing more than one ambiguity.…”

An Evaluative Review of Family Interaction Research

“…Game‐playing tasks are another variation. An early game was Ravich's (176) “train” problem, and the SIMFAM (simulated family interaction) has been introduced and used widely by Straus in many different settings (232, 234). Other games adapted for family research are the Marbles Test (Usandivaras, et al , [249]) and the Twenty Questions technique used by Waxler.…”

Development of a Cognitive Measure of Interpretive Style for Adult Children of Alcoholics

“…The conceptual framework that guided development of this instrument included family theory (Peterson and Rollins, 1987;Walsh, 1982) that describes how childhood family environment affects one's psychological adjustment in adulthood, and theories of cognitive interpretive style linked to depression, which suggest that how one interprets one's childhood experiences affects one's adjustment in adulthood (Abramson et al, 1980;Beck et al, 1979). An important premise that guided the development of this instrument is that how one cognitively reconstructs and makes meaning of childhood life experiences is often more important for psychological adjustment in adulthood than the "objective" properties of past life events (Filipp and Klauer, 1986;Rabkin, 1965). For example, Pierce et al (1992) found that how individuals interpret and perceive the social support they receive accounts more for their feeling valued and esteemed by others than does the actual support they receive.…”