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CLINICAL JUDGEMENT AND CLINICAL RESEARCH
Author(s) -
Mowbray R. M.
Publication year - 1972
Publication title -
medical journal of australia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.904
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1326-5377
pISSN - 0025-729X
DOI - 10.5694/j.1326-5377.1972.tb47055.x
Subject(s) - judgement , clinical judgement , depression (economics) , psychology , foundation (evidence) , verdict , medicine , clinical psychology , intensive care medicine , epistemology , history , philosophy , archaeology , political science , law , economics , macroeconomics
It is shown that clinical research is dependent upon clinical diagnosis—that in the area of depressive disorders, diagnosis is a shaky foundation —because of the difficuties involved in classifying depression. Some of the factor‐analytical studies of classification are examined, and found on the whole to be inconclusive, mainly because clinically observed data contained too much error. Awareness of this source of error can lead to the verdict that the previous work using factor analysis was premature. But factor analysis can still be used, provided that it is suppied with reasonably hard data.