Methodological Issues in Designing Research on Community-Wide Disasters with Special Reference to Chernobyl

Abstract

(from the chapter) delineate the distribution of illness or impairment in the population and the stress-related risk factors that are associated with both incidence (new onsets of disorder) and prevalence (recurrent episodes) / design a study of the mental health effects of Chernobyl on children who were evacuated to Kiev from Pripyat, a town built to house Chernobyl workers and their families / in attempting to design such a study, it became apparent that the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of prior research could not be easily applied to this circumstance / this paper addresses the special methodological issues that arose and highlights the alternatives, compromises, and inferential limitations that evolved when we attempted to design a feasible, yet epidemiologically sound, mental health study / describes the methodological challenges we faced in designing a cross-sectional comparative study of the Pripyat children (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).