Own Study

Sources of data used

1. Personal examination of the subjects, including: their personal accounts of their history, with the interviews conducted on informal lines in each case; physical and neurologic examination; body measurements; EEG-examinations; hormone analysis; examination of sex chromatin, occasionally supplemented with determination of the karyotype; analysis of personality by means of a questionnaire; psychologic tests of intellectual capacity and masculinity-femininity; examination for psychiatric disorders.

In each case I first had an informal conversation with the patient, when he or she gave me a brief account of their troubles. The next time we met they were asked to describe their particular problems in detail. After these two interviews, the patients gave an account of their history along the lines of a questionnaire used routinely at our institute. Most of the patients stayed at the hospital for a week or so while the examinations were being made.

2. Information from relatives -parents, sibs or other persons well acquainted with the subjects, such as husbands and wives.

3. Hospital records concerning birth, and from any time the subjects had been hospitalized.

4. Records of welfare agencies, including child welfare bureaus, social welfare bureaus, temperance boards, and state insurance offices. Enquiries were also made at all the psychiatric departments attached to general hospitals and at mental hospitals in the regions where the subjects had lived, as well as the two national psychiatric departments open for consultation to anyone in Sweden, and at all forms of institutions for child psychiatry, to learn whether they had ever been there for consultation. The same sources were tapped for information on the parents-except the child welfare bureaus, insurance offices and institutions for child psychiatry.