GENERAL-PRACTICE AND THE NEW SCIENCE EMERGING FROM THE THEORIES OF CHAOS AND COMPLEXITY

This paper outlines the general practice world view and introduces the main features of the theories of 'chaos' and complexity. From this, a nalogies are drawn between general practice and the theories, which su ggest a different way of understanding general practice and point to f uture developments in general practice research. A conceptual and prac tical link between qualitative and quantitative methods of research is suggested. Methods of combining data about social context with data a bout individuals and about biomedical factors are discussed. The paper emphasizes the importance of data collected over time and of consider ing the multiplicative interactions between variables. Finally, the pa per suggests that to develop this type of research, general practice m ay need to reassess systems of categorizing and recording appropriate data.