1998 Volume 9 Pages 60-69
The purpose of this article is to call attention to the methodological issues in studies on health, medical, and nursing sciences by reviewing articles on psychosocial stress and Type A Behavior Pattern (TABP) from the viewpoint of the sociology of science. The following two points are primarily discussed: 1) It is very likely that findings obtained from studies in these sciences would sometimes be inconsistent due to inevitable methodological imperfections, such as sampling biases, confounding factors, and so on. Therefore, it is quite difficult to obtain definite results on these issues from a small number of studies. A sufficient number of studies on these issues will be necessary to identify the etiological relationships between socio-cultural factors and health variables. 2) Furthemore, based on a review of TABP studies, it has been suggested that even scientific research activities are not absolutely objective, as if part of human social activity. Accordingly, we are not able to gain a full understanding of sociocultural etiology unless we collect a sufficient amount of data from various studies and review them fairly, in order to reach supportable conclusions.
