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PAUL H. WENDER, MD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1967;16(1):41-47.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

IT IS WIDELY, if not universally, accepted that psychological events are multidetermined; that there are no simple, unique explanations for most such events. In Psychological research, however, the investigation of several variables at once necessitates large numbers of subjects;^* and for practical reasons it is common to explore one variable at a time.

Historical cross-sectional studies are common in psychological and epidemiological research. Generally they seek to determine the frequency of occurrence of some crucial event or class of events in the histories of individuals in a particular pathological population in comparison with their frequency in a "normal" population. Typical examples are: (1) the incidence of psychopathology in the mothers of schizophrenics, (2) the incidence of early parental death in the histories of depressive patients, and (3) the incidence of early illness or trauma in the histories of childhood schizophrenics. The inference . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
BETHESDA, MD

From the Laboratory of Clinical Science, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Md.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication July 6, 1966.

In general, if n is the number of variables, there are 2n possible combinations (cells) so that, if it is desired to have a number in each cell about equal to that in a one-variable study (N), one will need approximately N2n subjects.

This technique is obviously not limited to psychiatric (or genetic-psychological) research but is employed in a number of fields. An example in medical research would be a study of the prevalence of a history of smoking in lung-cancer patients.

Reprint requests to National Institute of Health, Bethesda, Md 20014 (Dr. Wender).

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