Issues in research design in psychiatric hospitals.

This paper is a review of the status of research pertaining to the hospital setting and a proposed design for a program of research for psychiatric hospitals. Assessment of patient status, treatment, hospital characteristics, and aftercare settings are reviewed in the first section. The second section presents some possible instruments to measure these factors. The third section deals with the various hypotheses that have been proposed in the literature. The hypotheses are categorized into an overall theory to be tested by a program of research. The final section proposes a research program to test those hypotheses.