Problems and issues in family medicine psychosocial research

The authors believe that, despite their complexity, psychosocial factors should be included with biological variables in family medicine research. To aid this process, this article reviews some problems and issues in selected areas of psychosocial research relevant to family medicine. Basic background material, dimensions, models, intra-individual, intra-familial physiological mechanisms of transmission, and factors related to stress, support and coping, are discussed. This is followed by methodological issues that include research design, psychometric properties of measures, data collection, quantitative and qualitative methods, family assessment problems and techniques, and analytic procedures. The latter includes scoring problems, global versus specific questions, and statistical analyses issues. Finally, a discussion of biological relationships and potential biological markers for psychosocial processes or variables concludes this review.