Exploring attitudes: the case for Q methodology.

Attitudes are often referred to, researched and considered in the discipline of health education and health promotion. This paper highlights Q methodology as an appropriate and relevant means of exploring and studying attitudes within this field. It begins by discussing the difficulties in defining attitude and the problems inherent in attitude measurement. A brief history of Q methodology is given, followed by an explanation of what Q methodology is and the processes involved. This paper argues the case for the use of Q methodology when studying attitudes and justifies why Q methodology should particularly be selected in the study of attitudes within the health field. There are many reasons for this assertion which are explored throughout the paper. The principle one is that Q methodology is a more robust technique, than alternative methods, for the measurement of attitudes and subjective opinion. This paper concludes by proposing that Q methodology is taken up by researchers within health education and health promotion who are concerned with exploring attitudes and subjective opinion.

A combined clinical and histological assessment of survival of patients with Hodgkin's disease.

This paper reviews a series of 246 patients with Hodgkin's disease treated in the Royal Air Force Medical Service between 1940 and 1966. The clinical and histological staging of the disease in relation to the survival time is evaluated. The variation in the clinical patterns of the disease, together with the histological appearances in the affected glands, can be related to the patient's defence system. A most important clinical factor in assessing prognosis is considered to be the presence or absence of constitutional symptoms. The majority of the patients who had constitutional symptoms on presentation also had many glands involved. It was found in those patients who had no constitutional symptoms at the onset of the disease that there was little difference in survival time between those with glands involved in a single group or region and those with glands involved in many regions, whether above and/or below the diaphragm. Those patients with histologically well differentiated lesions showed a significantly higher survival rate than those in the histologically poorly differentiated groups.

Hodgkin's disease: histological classification and diagnosis.

A review of the previous histological classifications of Hodgkin's disease seems to show that they are insufficiently accurate in regard to prognosis and difficult to apply but a detailed study of a large number of cases suggests that certain criteria allow of subdivision of the disease into types. These criteria are the proportion of mature lymphocytes, the presence of plentiful mature histiocytes, the presence of fibrous nodularity, and the numbers of abnormal reticulum cells and their degree of anaplasia. Three primary histological subdivisions seem to arise from a study of 302 patients, namely, the reticular, histiocytic, and nodular sclerosis groups. These are further divided into well differentiated and poorly differentiated on the basis of their lymphocyte content and the degree of anaplasia of the abnormal reticulum cells. The histological appearances of each type are described. The application of this histological classification has been shown to correlate well with the clinical outcome.

A clinicopathological study of nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's disease.

The clinicopathological features of 29 patients with nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's disease are described. The histological appearances are those of a nodular pattern due to thick fibrous bands which encircle areas of abnormal lymphoid tissue in which a particular form of abnormal reticulum cell can be recognized. They can be further subdivided into well differentiated and poorly differentiated types; the median survival time from onset in the well differentiated type was approximately nine years and in the poorly differentiated type two years. The outstanding clinical feature of patients with the well differentiated histological pattern was repeated enlargements of various groups of lymph glands over long periods of time.

Estudio de vacunas antivariolicas desecadas y glicerinadas de potencia total o atenuada / Study of anti-smallpox vaccine attenuated

Publicado en ingles en el Bull. WHO 19(1):123-128, 1958