Research Designs and Data Analysis Methods Used for Family Health Research

An immense variety of research designs and data analytic methods are used in family health research. [Page 887]In part, this is due to the number of disciplines that focus on family and health connections. This multi-disciplinary literature spans the fields of medicine, health psychology, psychiatry, nursing, marriage and family therapy, epidemiology, family studies, psychology, sociology, demography, social work, community health, mental health, and gerontology. Each of these broad disciplinary groups contains epistemic preferences regarding the methods by which research questions are addressed. It would be impossible to review all of these methods, so methods are examined that have been employed over the past 20 years to reduce this literature to a more manageable size.