One advantage of case-control studies is that when little is known about a disease or health-related outcome, multiple risk factors can be assessed even when the outcome is rare. The strengths associated with this approach include inexpensive, quick, well-suited or diseases with long latency periods and can examine multiple etiologic risk factors. The disadvantages associated with case-control designs includes recall bias, cannot account for rare exposures and cannot determine incidence and sampling bias. However, one major disadvantage that will apply to this study is internal validity For instance, this problem refers to whether the effects observed in a study are due to the manipulation of the independent variable and not some other factor. In-other-words there is a causal relationship between the independent and dependent variable (McLeod, 2013). In terms of determining cause of depression in relation to social support, other factors can account for the correlation. For instance, the participants in the study can be diagnosed with depression due to chronic conditions, loss in the family or old age. Thus, social support may not be the only explanation for the …show more content…
Social Support Theory is often incorporated into health promotion interventions. Social support can be instrumental, informational, emotional, or appraising (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2002). The models of social support typically found in theoretical can be categorized as provider models. In these models one or more individuas’ network members provide helpful support to a recipient (Hupcey, 1998). Social support is not a concrete concept as it would appear in these models, but is a dynamic process that includes the interaction between the provider and recipient, and varies by recipient and provider (Hupcey, 1998). This theory is appropriate for this study in that it analyze social support in relation to health outcomes. More importantly, the objective of this study is to discover a relationship between low social supports that results in depression among the elderly population who resides in nursing home care