Abstract
This article review evaluates the manner in which the article under review followed all the writing style and the format as per the APA manual and the lecture notes. It also evaluates how the information of the article was presented in the abstract section and its appropriateness. The article reviews whether the authors support their claims in the introduction, with appropriate and enough works cited. The description of how the findings of this study were discussed is also included. The study is about the application of an empirical method in describing the course in schizophrenia, and the differentiation of the patients according to the criteria that were selected. The method was applied because it made it easier for the screening of large data since there are no requirements for the time-consuming and the subjective evaluation of personal life charts by the clinical assessor. The study, therefore, found out that the measures were able to discriminate well the different patterns of the course and also identified homogenous subject clusters. The clusters co-related with the groups that had been derived from the DSM-IV specifiers of the course.
Introduction
The abstract of the article, Empirical Method to Identify Patterns In The course Of Psychotic Episodes of People with Schizophrenia (Burti, et.al, 2009), contained relevant and appropriate information as per the topic. The abstract stated the objective of the study, the methods of data collection, the results of the research, and the conclusions made as per the findings. As stated in the article, studies have reversed the past beliefs on schizophrenia, where it was termed as an illness that was chronically deteriorating, and instead proved that there were common heterogeneous courses (Burti, et.al, 2009). The authors gave a well-defined introduction of the problem statement, which was schizophrenia and there were relevant citations from the sources they acquired their information. The citations also followed the correct format according to APA guidelines.
The recency of the sources used in the article is not long ago after the article was published. The range of the dates of the sources is approximately 5 to 10 years ago. The articles used to focus mainly on the data that had been collected from a weekly retroactive assessment of the conditions of the patients. The conditions were either psychotic or non-psychotic, and the pattern results were correlated with the patterns that employ the DSM-IV course specifiers, that is, the patterns that are based on clinical judgments (Burti, et.al, 2009). The information collected from the sources are relevant to the topic under review, in that, the sources examine the empirical patterns derived, that can be applied in studying the course patterns in schizophrenia.
The characteristics of the participants that were required for this study were provided in the method section. The subjects for the QUATRO study included 409 ICD-10 participants, who had a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia. The participants that were required in the research were appropriate samples of randomly picked 409 clinically diagnosed patients with schizophrenia (Burti, et.al, 2009).
The materials used to collect data was the DSM-IV course specifiers and a newly devised instrument known as the Clinical Course Assessment for the QUATRO study (CCA-EU). These devises were to guide the raters in identifying the psychotic episodes, the circumstances of the occurrence of the episodes, and hospitalization that was needed during the period of study.
The main findings were the number of findings on the two relevant areas of the instrument used, from two sections, and the total was 335. The first findings in the sections showed that 195 were male, 234 were single, 175 had attained secondary education, 52 were earning income, 144 were unemployed, and 107 were retired. The second major findings on the two sections were that the average age of the participants was 41 years, with the standard deviation being 11.5, and the range 18- 69 years. The mean duration of the illness was 13 years, with the standard deviation at 9 and the range at 0-47. The findings were presented numerically in a table that reported the descriptive statistics, that is the mean, standard deviation, and the median, for each of the clusters and the samples altogether (Burti, et.al, 2009).
The main limitation of the study was the retroactive assessment that needed weekly recordings of positive psychotic symptoms, that is one aspect of the schizophrenic course over the duration of one year. The second limitation mentioned in the study was in the cluster analysis where there was dependence on the number of subjective choices, whereby the variety of choices used, would lead to different results. The other limitations mentioned was in choosing the optimal number of the groups that resulted in the results of the study (Burti, et.al, 2009). The major contribution made by the authors regarding this topic to my general knowledge was to help in knowing more about the patterns of the psychotic episodes that schizophrenic patients have and know how they occur, and to the age at which it’s at its peak.
Conclusion
In my opinion after reviewing the article, I believe that the article was a good research because it gave out the empirical patterns of the psychotic episodes that occur in schizophrenic individuals. The article added more knowledge regarding schizophrenia as a whole and the patients who have been clinically diagnosed. The high occurrence of disease among the male was shocking, and I was not aware of this result.
References
Burti, L., et.al. (2009). An empirical method to identify patterns in the course of psychotic episodes of people with schizophrenia. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, 18(4): 265–27. Wiley InterScience.
