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LEONARD P. ULLMANN, Ph.D.; LEE GUREL, Ph.D.

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1962;7(2):130-134.

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

Nolan D. C. Lewis remarks⁴ that "the development of thought and research in psychiatry is really the story of the evolution of the scientific method" and that the first step which characterizes the scientific method is that "the observations must be made and recorded in definite terms." Systematic observation of all cases, not just the novel or particularly interesting case, may be said to have begun with Pinel's appointment to the Bicêtre: "Thus it was Pinel who actually introduced the taking of psychiatric case histories and the keeping of case records. At first the majority of these records were Pinel's personal notes made for his own use, but the principle was established and it proved the cornerstone of a psychiatric research which would have been totally impossible without the permanent, systematic case records which are now the measure and identifying sign of a good mental hospital." . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Author Affiliations
PALO ALTO, CALIF.; WASHINGTON, D.C.

Footnotes
Submitted for publication Aug. 10, 1961.

This material, which was prepared at the Behavioral Research Laboratory, Veterans Administration Hospital, Palo Alto, Calif., is part of the VA's Psychiatric Evaluation Project.

A distinction must be made between the communications themselves and the uses to which they were put. The latter may be validated, and, in fact, were shown to be valid by the results of the present study. However, the valid use of communications implies that the communications themselves have some form of "validity." This form of "validity" may be called semantic validity and in the present article may be conceived in terms of Davenport's¹ formulation of reliable-discrimination: "A reliablydiscriminating statement is one which is used in the same manner by most clinicians, and which discriminates between data to which it applies and data to which it does not apply. Those statements which are reliably applied to all data or no data are excluded because they do not discriminate. Those statements which are applied by the same proportion of clinicians to all data, or which might be applied by some clinicians to any data, are also excluded for the same reason. What are left are nonambiguous (operationally defined), nonuniversal statements."

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