Qualitative studies in the evaluation of the occurrence of mental illnesses in the space of the city
Abstract
The issue of the occurrence of mental illnesses was the subject of the studies published in both medical and sociological journals. The first pioneering works in this subject were written by R.E.L. Faris and H.W. Dunham from the Chicago school in 1944. Their work was based on quantitative studies. Qualitative studies, on the other hand, were hidden in the description and characteristic of the areas examined, and not enumerated in the methodology. The author of the article, conducting the research on the arrangement of people psychiatrically hospitalized in the area of Tarnowskie Góry, started from quantitative studies. Initially, though, he assumed that in these studies he can base on the administrative division of the city because the majority of the problems examined appeared in the estates with dominant flat estates whereas in the mixed structure districts dominated the problems in less attractive places. Knowing in which districts and areas the very problems dominate, one can make further considerations on the existence of possible relations. One’s own observations and deliberations on these places constitute the qualitative data stored in one’s mind. R.E. Park wrote that a researcher must “pass” many places to make his/her opinion. Thus, it is very likely that these initial observations, sometimes unintended, and, later on reconstructed, may give more information than an attempt to use selected techniques of qualitative studies, especially in such an attractive subject for the majority of inhabitants as the place of living of mentally ill people. One can add that a photographic method supplementing the data would be helpful here as it would leave certain openness for interpretation and freedom in selection of situations for consolidation and further analyses. The author of the work spent many hours thinking how to take an active part (a participant observation) and obtain information on a given subject in selected urban areas but as a rule, he was convinced that the issue of the occurrence of mental disorders the areas of the city was beyond a direct perception of its inhabitants.
Śląski Uniwersytet Medyczny w Katowicach Katedra i Oddział Kliniczny Psychiatrii w Tarnowskich Górach Poland
The Copyright Owners of the submitted texts grant the Reader the right to use the pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY SA). The user can copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose.
1. License
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.
2. Author’s Warranties
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
3. User Rights
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
4. Co-Authorship
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.
