Research Methods for Clinical and Health Psychology

DAVID F. MARKS served as Head of the School of Psychology at Middlesex Polytechnic, and as Head of the Department of Psychology at City University, London, UK. Previously David held positions at the University of Sheffield, UK, and at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His other books include The Psychology of the Psychic (1980, with R. Kammann), Theories of Image Formation (1986), Imagery: Current Developments (1990, with J.T.E. Richardson and P. Hampson), The Quit For Life Programme: An Easier Way to Stop Smoking and Not Start Again (1993), Improving the Health of the Nation (1996, with C. Francome), Dealing With Dementia: Recent European Research (2000, with C.M. Sykes), The Psychology of the Psychic (Revised Edition) (2000), The Health Psychology Reader (2002), Research Methods for Clinical and Health Psychology (2004, with L. Yardley), and Overcoming Your Smoking Habit (2005). David is the Editor of the Journal of Health Psychology and Health Psychology Open. After completing my first degree in psychology I trained and practiced clinically as an audiological scientist (testing and rehabilitating people with hearing and balance difficulties), before moving back into psychology to undertake a PhD. After a brief period as a non-clinical scientist at the MRC Unit in Numan Movement and Balance (National Hospital for Neurology, Queen Square, London). I became a lecturer and then senior lecturer in Psychology as Applied to Medicine at University College London. Returning to my home town of Southampton, I was appointed a Reader and then Professor of Health Psychology. I try to warn people that I have great difficulty recognising faces due to developmental prosopagnosia or 'face-blindness', which neuroscientists are now discovering is more common than was previously thought, affecting about 1 person in 50 (https://www.faceblind.org/people/yardley08jpsychosomres.pdf). The main effect of this is to make me appear very rude when I fail to recognise people I have met, so please say Hello when you meet me - I will remember you and our previous meeting, just not your face!