The Galicia study of mental health of the Elderly I: general description of methodology

✍ Scribed by Professor R. Mateos; F. GonzÁLEZ; M. Páramo; M.C. García; M.C. Carollo; A. Rodríguez-López

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 158 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1049-8931
• DOI: 10.1002/mpr.90

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Reports of epidemiological surveys do not always adequately provide a careful description of the methodology used and the sociocultural context involved. The objective of this paper is to describe the methodology used in a survey whose aim was to study the prevalence of the wide range of psychiatric disorders that were present in a population aged 60 and above who were living at home. The Galicia Community Study of Mental Health of the Elderly was designed in two phases. In the first, a random sample of 3,580 people over 60 years of age, representative of each of the nine public health authority areas, was interviewed at home. The 60‐item version of Goldberg's General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) was the screening instrument. In the second phase, all the traced subjects with high GHQ scores (N = 532) and a representative sample (N = 149) of people below the cut‐off point, were interviewed at home using the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS‐III). This paper analyses the sociodemographic context of Galicia (a natural region in south‐western Europe with a population of 2.7 million inhabitants), the sampling method, the sociodemographic makeup of the sample, the fieldwork, and the method for obtaining the estimate of prevalence. Copyright © 2000 Whurr Publishers Ltd.