Browsing by Subject "psychopathology"

Goals: Symptom networks as a concept came to the research field only less than 10 years ago. Symptom network is a new statistical approach, where disorder’s symptoms are seen as separate mutually interacting elements, compared to predominant way of seeing symptoms as indicators of common background latent variable. There is only limited amount of reviews available on the topic. Goal of this thesis to review state of symptom network research, i.e. what and with which methodologies is researched with emphasis on the theoretical developments of the concept. At the same time possible and necessary future research avenues discussed. Methods: Thesis is literature review. Google Scholar was used as a search engine and search was done using expression ‘ “symptom network” psychology ’. Only research published after 2008 is included. Due to length limitations of the review, only results from two first result pages were used. After this, based on the found articles references some extra inquiries were performed. Results and conclusions: Main result is that there are very promising results within existing research and statistical methods and measures start to settle. However, there is need for more versatile research, as well as for reproduction of results. Slightly worrying observation is that lion share of symptom network research is done by one research group. This thesis provided quite good overview of the research field, though it is left on slightly non-specific level.