rosenhan 1973 Flashcards
aim?
to see whether 8 sane people could be admitted to 12 different hospitals and then be found to be sane.
sample?
pseudo patients - 8 people mainly students, one of them being Rosenhan. (3 woman 5 men)
participants were the nurses and doctors from 12 different hospitals in America - all of which varied, there was private, public, small or big.
what was the first thing the pseudo patients did?
they rang the hospital asking for an appointment and asked to come for a fact - face interveiw.
what did the pseudo patients say during their face-face interview?
they acted normally apart from informing the clinician that they were hearing voices saying “thud, hollow or empty” - these words were chosen as they seemed to place emphasis on a persons life.
did the pseudo patients lie about anything other than the voices.
they gave fake names to protect their identity, but apart from that they told the truth and acted normally.
what happened after the interview?
all 8 were admitted into hospitals where from then on they were instructed to act normally and the only way of getting out was convincing staff they were sane.
what did the pseudo patients do once they were inside the hospitals?
they made notes, at first in private, but soon they realised that the nurses were oblivious and weren’t paying attention. - they stopped displaying any signs of abnormality however some were a little nervous.
how did the other patients react to their presence?
they were sure that they were sane, 35 out of 118 patients voiced their suspicions, such as “you’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor.”
how long on average did the participants stay in the hospital?
19 days, but varied between 7-52.
what were they diagnosed with?
all but one was diagnosed with schizophrenia, the other with bipolar depression.
how were they discharged?
schizophrenia in remission.
were the pseudo patients ever detected?
no, and there was no hospital records of staff feeling suspicious of their behaviour.
what conclusions can be made from this study?
the failure to detect sanity may be because doctors are more favourable to type 2 errors, meaning they are more likely to diagnose a healthy person as sick than a sick person as healthy (type 1.) -due to it being less dangerous to do so.
what was the aim of Rosenhan’s second study?
to investigate whether the tendency towards diagnosing the sane as insane could be reversed.
what caused Rosenhan to try this second study?
another hospital heard the findings of the first study and did not believe it to be true. Rosenhan told them that 1 or more pseudo patients would be coming to the hospital in the next 3 months.
