Bradshaw (1998) - Case Study

Question 1

What is significant about this case study?

Answer 1

It shows how scientific research proceeds and established CBT as a treatment

Question 2

Who was carol?

Answer 2

A 26 year old student with an upper class background in her first year of uni who had no history of psychotic illness

Question 3

Was carol her real name?

Answer 3

No, it was a psuedonym to protect her identity

Question 4

How did she know she had schizophrenia?

Answer 4

She began to experience auditory hallucinations and had delusions, she then withdrew from people and acted bizarly

Question 5

What type of schizophrenia was she diagnosed with?

Answer 5

Undifferentiated type

Question 6

What was her global assessment functioning score before treatment?

Answer 6

30/100

Question 7

What anti psychotic drug did she take alongside CBT?

Answer 7

Thorazine but she still couldn’t function independently before the CBT

Question 8

What is triangulation?

Answer 8

Pooling all data from research methods to look for trends and themes

Question 9

What was the aim of the case study?

Answer 9

To investigate how CBT can be used to treat a woman with schizophrenia

Question 10

It was a prospective case study which means

Answer 10

they tracked her progress over 3 years and followed up her progress 6 months after therapy and again after a year

Question 11

What scales were her sypmtoms measured on?

Answer 11

1. Role functioning scale (RFS)
2. Global Attainment scale (GAS)
3. Hospitalisation
4. Global Pathology Index

Question 12

What is the role functioning scale?

Answer 12

a score for her ability to work, socialise and live independently

Question 13

What is the global attainment scale?

Answer 13

goals she was able to meet

Question 14

What is hospitalisation?

Answer 14

The amount of times she was hospitalised

Question 15

What us the global pathology index?

Answer 15

an 8 point scale measuring symptoms

Question 16

What was stage 1?

Answer 16

Where she developed a relationship with her therapist by taking walks, they found they both had an interest in softball

Question 17

How did Carol describe her condition?

Answer 17

“I’m no good, I can’t do anything, I’ll always be this way”

Question 18

What was stage 2?

Answer 18

Where Carol was taught about CBT and her disorder, they set goals and discovered methods of coping with stress

Question 19

What was stage 3?

Answer 19

The treatment stage where she learnt to manage stress, had to record her day, build coping strategies and focused on her fears e.g social situations where they challeneged her beliefs

Question 20

How were her fears of relapse challenged?

Answer 20

She had anxiety and depression over fears of relapse which were challenged by creating a stress thermometer, scheduling activites, planning sleep patterns, exerising and dieting

Question 21

What impact did the therapy have on Carol herself?

Answer 21

She became more confident of her stability and could talk about the impact of schizophrenia as if gave her low self esteem and made her critical of herself

Question 22

How did they try and boost her self esteem?

Answer 22

They taught her to identify 3 positive events in her life each day, no matter how minor the event was and she had to think of positive words to describe them and herself

Question 23

What happened in the ending phase?

Answer 23

She had to develop plans to maintain treatment without the therapist but writing cue cards with coping strategies on

Question 24

Did Carol improve?

Answer 24

Yes, on all measures and even after a year these were still present

Question 25

How did her GPI improve?

Answer 25

Year 1 - 6
Year 2 - 4
Year 3 - 1

Question 26

How did her GAS improve?

Answer 26

19.85 at pre test, 80.15 in year 3

Question 27

How did her RFS improve?

Answer 27

6 in pre test, 27 in year 3

Question 28

What did the increase in her GAS show?

Answer 28

Her treatment goals had been attained as she started a college course and took on a volunteer job

Question 29

What did the increase in RFS show?

Answer 29

She had few symptoms present and reported little distress

Question 30

Was she ever re hospitalised?

Answer 30

No

Question 31

How does Bradshaw and Roseborough (2004) give the study credibility?

Answer 31

They did a meta analysis of 22 patients, 86% improve their psychosocial functioning, 82% had reduced severity of symptoms

Question 32

What is a major weakness of the case study?

Answer 32

That CBT wasn’t used alone so there is no guarantee that it was the CBT that produced the improvement, lacks internal validity

Question 33

How is it hard to generalise to other sufferers?

Answer 33

She is female and it presents itself different in men, she had undifferentiated type which isn’t the only type and someone else may not build the rapport she built

Question 34

How could the study be replicable?

Answer 34

The CBT therapy follows a standard procedure and the measures of functioning are all well established tools and the same measures were used 4 times overall, test retest reliability

Question 35

What is the main application?

Answer 35

It has helped promote the use of CBT and lower dependency on anti psychotic drugs

Question 36

How is the data more valid?

Answer 36

It is both quantitative and qualitative providing objective and detailed results

Question 37

How were ethics respected?

Answer 37

She has a pseudonym, although it could be said that she wasn’t well enough to give informed consent

Question 38

What are case studies?

Answer 38

Involves studying individuals or small groups with some kind of unique characteristic or experience, often uses triangulation

Question 39

What type of data is usually gathered in a case study?

Answer 39

qualitative and quantitative as brain scans might take place as well as observations

Question 40

When are case studies particularly useful?

Answer 40

When dealing with unique situations