[5.3.4]

Part 4

The above inventory of daily round symptoms and contexts of observation is to be supplemented by suitable annotations covering the person's activities on the daily round. Hourly entries by the subject would include:

(i) time of the day;
(ii) place of the activity;
(iii) nature of the activity;
(iv) circumstances surrounding it;
(v) how long the activity took;
(vi) microdescription of relevant data.

Activities to be reported would be listed in advance and attempt to be medically relevant: ingesting anything; doing particular test movements or exercise; using limbs and senses to carry out some work, household, or personal task; and so on. Thus, pre-printed forms for reporting and practice in using the system would seem to us to be essential. This holds for both specialized data (MDR Reports) and general daily round data (DRA). Tape recording or dictating to a companion offer alternative recording procedures in cases where filling out written forms is not to be expected. An additional possibility is that of regular interviews dispersed sufficiently through the course of a day and written up to serve as the usual daily round report written by the subject.

Illustrations and samples for DRA data may be found throughout this Workbook (see Index). We do not, at the time of this writing, have any samples of MDR data, but we think an illustration of the system that is envisaged may be helpful at this stage. The psychosomatic taxonomy given here may be considered a pilot investigation to gain a better understanding of the methodological issues involved. Below is, thus, a report which attempts to make use of the taxonomy outlined above.

The coding of each entry follows the functional taxonomy and was annotated by the subject. Note that the content of the entries specify details concerning the item or fact being reported; the latter is identified by the coding markers on the right. If we tabulate the data on the right of the entries, we obtain the following distribution for this particular case report:

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