ABSTRACT
T HE PUR P 0 S E 0 F the project, which was exploratory and descriptive in character, was mainly to break ground in the com· plicated area of the dilemma of adolescence, to sketch out boundaries and provide clinical hypotheses for future studies of more specific design. The project was designed to be a five·year study of 101 adolescent outpatients and a similar five-year study of a matched group of 101 controls or nonpatients. This book is devoted primarily to the patient study, which began in December, 1956, and was concluded in 1962, the subsequent time being spent in analyzing and reporting. A part of the control study [49, 51), focused on the last element of the theory, began in 1961 and is still in progress. It is partially reported in Chapters 13 and 14·
To provide a background for our study, it is necessary to describe two conflicting views about psychiatric research that are a result of the marked advances in the technology of the physical sciences [44). These advances, far outdistancing those of the behavioral sciences, have tempted the latter to borrow techniques from the former, to minimize the methodologic pitfalls in clinical research. This has created a conflict between two points of view. The one we call the clinical, stresses the stochastic nature of the material and emphasizes the importance of the observations and interpretations of the individ· ual observer. The other, considered more scientific by its proponents, we call the systematic; it stresses the need to control bias and emphasizes the use of more than one observer, careful definitions of the variables to be studied, and the employment of coding schemes, data analysis, and statistical probability calculations.
