PURPOSE. To examine the visual status of a cohort of older adults on an orthopedic unit to determine their level of available vision to complete everyday activities in the hospital setting. METHOD. A convenience sample of 50 people was recruited. A visual history was obtained, and participants' glasses were inspected. Distance acuity, reading acuity, and contrast sensitivity were assessed using standardized screening charts. RESULTS. Of participants, 26% did not have their glasses with them until prompted, and 85% had glasses in poor condition. When tested wearing their habitual correction, 6% had low vision, 2% were blind, 41% had reading acuities worse than 20/25, and 28% had contrast sensitivity deficits. CONCLUSION. Visual impairment is prevalent in older adults, yet visual function is not routinely screened in hospitals. Occupational therapists should routinely inquire about patients' visual status, inspect their glasses, and encourage regular eye examinations. Failure to address vision could lead to inaccurate evaluation results.
odal Origins of Depression'* is an impressive book by almost anyone's standards. It combines an unusual clarity of thought about problems in research design with a meticulous attention to difficulties of measurement. It consistently poses questions (tf theory development. It offers a way of fusing the macro and micro in sociological analysis and faces directly the role of subjective meaning in sociological analysis. To address all of these issues in the context of a single and empirical study is no mean achievement. What is especially seductive, kowever, is the repeated suggestion that the decisions to be made in these areas are methodological ones, to be solved by a dear appreciation of principles of sound research design and statistical inference.No sociologist, it would seem, could dispute the importance of maxims such as the following. Qearly define your variables and separate, when appropriate, the dependent and the independent; when in doubt, disaggregate; do not generalize beyond the population from whidi you have sampled (or indeed, beyond the range of variance in your variables); do not confound, at the level of measurement, variables separate at the level of conceptualization, and so on. Such apparently inccHitestable guidelines are shown to have been frequently violated and previous work is thus castigated for methodological incompetence. This paper focuses upon die issue of methodological competence as discussed in Brawn and Harris's work, arguing that theirs is a commonly held view of methodology which deserves a much more direct and critical attention than it at present receives. This is in no way to suggest that the findings of the study do not deserve serious attention in their own right. They do, and a number of comments and more extended commentaries are already available.^ For the most part, however, these have paid attention to technical points and criticism. Here we try to draw attention to certain wider issues.Neither psychiatric nor sociological research is spared from the critical gaze of these authors. The psycho-analysts get short shrift; due praise is given for their efforts to fasten onto the subjective meaning of events for individuals, but their clinical case studies offer no way of confirming or disconfirming aetiological hypotheses. Research-minded psychiatrists are a target when they unthinkingly use the International Classification oi Diseases and reproduce categories which confuse causal hypotheses with the definition of the dependent variable (e.g. 'endogenous depression*). Brown and Harris also reveal as highly questicmable a procedure which seeks to test aetiological hypotheses on a sample of patients, these latter being a distinctive subset of all those with disease. Sociologists can perhaps be particularly castigated for their continued rediscovery of associations between mental illness and variables such as sex, age, occupaticm etc. The result, diey argue, is what Suchman has called a 'morass of inconclusive correlations', with the explanatory task left all but untouched (...
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