Research Tradition in Occupational Therapy: Process, Philosophy and Status.

Edited by Royeen CB. Thorofare, NJ 08086, Slack Inc, 1988, paper, 94 pp, $19.95

The author comments that "this book will not train someone to be a researcher. Rather it is geared to familiarize the interested occupational therapist to the values, attitudes, and conceptualizations underlying research in general and occupational research specifically." The work is divided into four chapters.

The author devotes the first chapter, "The Research Process in Occupational Therapy," to the need for research in the occupational therapy profession. Her arguments for increased research efforts in occupational therapy also hold true for increased research efforts in physical therapy. The remainder of Chapter I is devoted to defining and categorizing research, developing guidelines for quality in research, and describing the research plan. Although the author makes a clear case for more research to validate current practice techniques and to develop new evaluation and treatment strategies in occupational therapy, this chapter is too cursory for the average student's first exposure to research evaluation.

The second chapter, "A Humanist's Approach to Research," outlines the humanistic principles underlying occupational therapy, humanistic research, and the reflective process in humanistic research. This chapter is very philosophical in nature; I found that it offers very little useful information to students who are learning to read the biomedical research literature.

The third chapter, "Research Design as Clinical Practice," highlights the parallels between integrating research in clinical practice and problem solving in the clinical setting and the research laboratory. Additional topics include selecting a research topic, reviewing the literature, defining the research question, collecting data, executing the project, and interpreting results and conclusions. Because this is a relatively brief chapter, the coverage of these topics is superficial.

The final chapter addresses the current state of the art in occupational therapy research. Topics include analysis of the occupational therapy literature regarding statistically oriented articles and nonquantitative articles and the frequency with which various statistical tests are used. The most useful portion of the chapter is a list of statistical tests with which students should be familiar, in order to read and interpret occupational therapy and related biomedical research.

The authors accomplish their stated goals to some degree, but I believe the goals are too limited. I cannot recommend this book as a text in an introductory course on reading and interpreting biomedical research. My impression is based on the limited coverage of the topics, a superfluous philosophical chapter, the omission of many topics included in standard texts on research design, and the relatively high cost for a 94-page paperback book. I believe that beginning researchers or instructors seeking a text for an introductory research class would be better served by using one of the other standard research design texts developed for undergraduate or graduate students. I also believe this book would be of very limited value to the personal collections of most physical therapy researchers or other biomedical researchers.