Related Experiment Videos
The reliability and characteristics of the brief syntactic analysis
Background:
Linguistic analysis is of great potential benefit to psychiatry as a research and assessment tool, but the skill and time it demands means that it has not been widely used. This paper describes a much simplified form of syntactic analysis.
Method:
A detailed protocol for the Brief Syntactic Analysis (BSA) was written, based on earlier work by Morice and Ingram. Three psychiatrists were trained in its use, and inter-rater reliability established through independent ratings of 12 transcripts taken from a mixed group of psychiatric patients and a group of non-psychiatric controls. Concurrent reliability of the BSA against the Morice and Ingram analysis was established by comparing measures from the two methods on 16 transcripts of mixed patients.
Results:
There were high levels of agreement between the three psychiatrists and between the BSA and the Morice and Ingram analysis, although one-way ANOVA indicated that for some variables there were small but statistically significant absolute differences between the two. The reasons for this were discussed. A principal components analysis confirmed the presence of three factors corresponding closely to the three families of linguistic variables.
Conclusions:
The results indicate that psychiatrists can be trained to use a syntactic analysis with high levels of agreement. The BSA, which takes much less time to complete, produces measures that are comparable with the original analysis from which it was derived.