Dalen per (2 résultats)

Paperback. Etat : Brand New. 164 pages. 9.35x6.50x0.37 inches. In Stock.

Etat : Wie neu. Gr. 8°. 164 Seiten mit zahlreichen Tabellen im Text. Originalkarton. Einband berieben. - According to a widely held view, there is no link whatsoever between the time of birth, and the subsequent fate of an individual human being. This view is sometimes dogmatically defended, as if it were a bulwark of rational science against rank superstition. Historically this attitude may be justified, but it clearly exaggerates the importance of a hypothesis which is not only far from being self-evidently true, but has in fact been repeatedly disproved by the findings of reliable empirical studies. One of the most puzzling, and also one of the best studied among these findings is the excess of persons born in the first three or four months of the year in samples of schizophrenic patients. There are analogous findings in samples of certain congenital malformations, but we tend to regard this as less puzzling. This is probably so because the apparent time span between cause and effect is much shorter in these cases, and malformations are also obviously somatic phenomena. The null-hypothesis of no relationship between time of birth and later events is the. natural starting-point of any study in this area - one should try to overthrow it, using appropriate statistical tests of significance and relevant control figures. Some of the early studies on season of birth failed to achieve this because of methodological shortcomings, and even now the situation is less than satisfactory because of a lack of suitable statistical methods, and difficulties with control figures. The season-of-birth effect in schizophrenia is by now a fairly well established fact, in spite of the above-mentioned difficulties. Yet so far we have no satisfactory explanation of it. One of the aims of the present study is to indicate how this phenomenon could be made to serve useful scientific purposes in spite of our ignorance of its origin. Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 550.…