ABSTRACT
The main focus of palliative care research is the patients, but there is also research interest in the needs and the situation of informal and professional caregivers, and the views and opinions of the general public regarding issues of end of life care. In general, the choice of the palliative care population is driven by the research question that impacts both methods and type of study. This chapter focuses on the challenge of defining the population to be studied and the specific characteristics of patients, caregivers, and the general population in the research context. Studies focusing on one specific population give detailed information on this group but have limited generalizability to the whole palliative care population. If inclusion criteria are confined to those with relatively poor prognoses, there is a risk of excluding a group of healthier patients whose inclusion would have improved the generalizability of the study results.
