Social science and psychiatric epidemiology. A difficult relationship

Abstract

The difficulty in the relationships among the social sciences, psychiatry and epidemiology is important because it inhibits incremental growth of scientific knowledge regarding human behavior. This in turn handicaps coping with social, psychological and cultural perturbations which currently threaten human existence. A major reason for the difficulty in the relationships is the presence of divergent views among the various relevant disciplines with regard to the nature of the scientific process. This article presents an outline of the scientific process modelled on those sciences which focus on living systems. Growth in scientific knowledge is seen to occur as a result of a spiral movement in which articulating conceptual and operational transactions alternate. A problem of our time is that parts of the spiral are often disengaged and conducted independently in a way that makes impossible the incremental synthesis of theory, hypotheses, premisses and data.