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The first part of this study was concerned with the development of a reliable method of assessing the spontaneous causal attributions that relatives made during the Camberwell Family Interview (CFI).

Although there were two other systems available for assessing spontaneous attributions (the CAVE: Peterson et al,1983;1985;

the LACS: Stratton et al,1986;1988), neither placed emphasis on measuring the am ount of explaining that subjects engage in during natural discourse; and where the attributions of relatives of

schizophrenic patients had been studied (Brewin et al, 1988) it was argued that the LACS system adapted for the work was of unreported reliability regarding the extraction of causal statements; and that the method of measuring causal dimensions had some shortcomings which required further development. Before reviewing the development and adaptations of the systems adopted for this study, it is important to consider some general issues concerning the assessment of spontaneously reported attributions and the use of the CFI as the source m aterial.

It can be argued that the assessment of attributions from a long interview where beliefs are not directly solicited is the most

appropriate way of measuring the amount of causal activity that the relatives 'naturally' engaged in. Given that causal explanations are not prompted or constrained by the questioning of the experimenter, the method overcomes problems of validity and social desirability and permits the study of beliefs occurring under more naturalistic

conditions. However, this kind of methodology is very new - Turnquist et al (1988) comment in their discussion of the study of attributions about illness: "The present literature has typically conceptualised attributions as explicit public statements of causality in response to direct probes" (p.60) - and is not without its problems. Some of these difficulties are inherent in the study of spontaneous attributions, and others are specific to this study. In the first instance, relatives are only assessed on the range of causal events that they present: it is thus impossible to discern whether each relatives' causal belief

profile, in terms of the quantity, content and type of attributions, is equally representative of their 'true' causal belief structure. For example, the measure of 'rate of attributions' used in the study and equated with the amount of causal search relatives engage in may not be as valid for one relative as it is for the next. A related point is

that a proportional score on an attributional dimension may not be as meaningful when based on a few attributions as when derived from 20 or 30. Attributional style researchers in the area of depression (eg. Peterson et al, in press) suggest that 4 or more attributions are

required for reliable assessments, although the authors do not report empirical validation of their observations. The argument they put forward for maximising the number of causal statements is that

larger numbers reduce the reality of the situation and hence overide the situational cues which would normally determine the directions of causality. Since this study is interested in how salient factors in the illness - chronicity and severity, for example - direct particular types of explanation, according to Peterson et al's argument, the more attributions assessed the more one is likely to be measuring the general attributional style of relatives for negative events, rather than their response to reality based situations. A logical corrollory of the prediction is that the more causal searching a person does, then the less relevance situational factors have for them ( in this case, under what circumstances patient behaviours are observed), and a generalised explanatory style is more important. The exclusion of hypothetical events and causes from extracted attributions was intended to reduce the measurement of attributional style per se. However, the tendency for situational cues to have less saliency with an increased number of attributions deserves further exploration, since it could have importance for understanding differences in the

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beliefs of relatives who make few or many attributions and also in modifying relatives' beliefs about the patient's causal role.

Since the CFI was also the source material for rating the expressed emotion of the relatives in the study, its appropriateness for

assessing their attributions should be considered. The attributional variables and the EE variables are not completely independent measures and hence it could be argued that some of the association between the two may be explained by overlap of content. This issue is most pertinent in the case of critical comments, where it was

reported that a substantial number of criticisms were also extracted as attributional statements. While acknowledging this problem, the data strongly indicate that the attributional statements were

extracted from a different, albeit overlapping, sample of interview statements: over 85% of the statements were not critical comments and less than 25% of the criticisms were included as causal

statements. Moreover, it could be argued that the attributions are the most im portant variables in explaining the predictive power of the EE concept for relapse, and hence that some overlap between the two measures is inevitable. This proposal will be further discussed in later sections.