Primary Tenet
The fundamental tenet of WSR is that the research object should be approached as a whole system, whether it be a patient, a family or other social unit, a clinic, a health-care delivery system, or a social and cultural context. One approach to WSR is to try to identify all of the influential variables, at multiple levels of meaning, and especially to evaluate the interrelationships among those variables that lead to the behavior of the dynamic system. Alternatively, one can regard a whole system as being too complicated to analyze given our current state of knowledge, instead one can design studies to characterize complex and emergent system behaviors.
The former path leads to studies involving intensive measurement processes, including integration of qualitative and quantitative methods, while the latter leads to pragmatic studies that focus on potential beneficial outcomes, rather than on how the system works. Regardless of the path, WSR is based on the premise that medical systems are generally too complex to permit good predictions of their behavior based on simple reductionist scientific studies.
Read more about this topic: Whole Systems Research
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