This paper is an overview of qualitative research and its application to psychiatry. It is introductory and attempts to describe both the aims of qualitative research and its underlying philosophical basis. We describe the practice and process of qualitative research and follow this with an overview of the 3 main methods of inquiry: interviews, focus groups, and participant observation. Through...

I n the basic sciences, investigators frequently conduct descriptive studies as a prelude to formulating and testing hypotheses. These discovery studies can be quite unbounded at the outset as investigators accumulate novel information that will serve as the building blocks for future studies. In the clinical sciences, descriptive studies are also common, but they are almost always based on dat...

the purpose of this article was to plan development al strategies for sabzevar based on the sustainable development theory. the method of research has been descriptive and most of the data used in the study were secondary (documentations) which were then analyzed using delphi and swot models with a strategic approach. documentation and qualitative research methods such as deep interview and ind...

Formal observation in psychiatric settings is a widely accepted intervention employed by psychiatric nurses to reduce the incidence of adverse patient outcomes such as suicides, self-harm, violence and elopements in the psychiatric population. Formal observation includes general or routine observation, observation every 15 or 30 min, continuous or constant observation, and one-to-one observatio...

There has been a steady growth in recent decades in Nepal in health and health services research, much of it based on quantitative research methods. Over the same period international medical journals such as The Lancet, the British Medical Journal (BMJ), The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care and many more have pu...