But other behaviors are more elusive. We will find out this semester that females outnumber males when we look at depression or anxiety, but males outnumber females as substance abusers. Our text discusses unstructured versus structured interviews, and the structured interview does yield more reliable data for making a diagnosis. However, if they do not ask the right questions, their guts can be wrong. Our text discusses seven approaches to studying abnormal behavior.
Direct observation is the oldest and still considered quite reliable.
As you will find out as you read about the various syndromes, all of the disorders are considered to have multiple causes. We only have hypotheses, and we form hypotheses by talking to people who are well and ill, yet from the same family or environment. The worst danger of the case study is a narrow focus on what that theorist is interested in. I would like to mention retrospective and prospective studies because they have been important in abnormal psychology. Prospective studies are wonderful, and they have been done on the children of schizophrenics and alcoholics in addition to the regular population to see if there are any childhood clues that point to a later disorder.