A tool for measuring the asthma self-management competency of families.
A tool for measuring a family's asthma self-management behaviour has been developed for a study examining the relationships of asthma self-management behaviour, knowledge, and psychosocial factors with various indices of morbidity in children with asthma. The tool involves a structured interview which includes three typical situations of asthma self-management (scenarios). Each of the scenarios is divided into graded challenges. A scoring schedule was developed according to the critical incidents of self-management inherent in each situation. This schedule was then applied to the verbatim transcripts of the subjects' responses. These were presented to 380 asthmatic children aged 5-11 yr and their primary caregivers. Inter-rater reliability, inter-rater agreement and test-retest reliability coefficients indicate that the scores obtained are stable across raters and time. Correlations between scores on different scenarios suggest there is a common factor of self-management competency across all scenarios, but families are better at some aspects of self-management than others. The distribution of scores for each scenario is presented. The place of this tool as a means of assessing self-management behaviour is discussed.
Green Lane Hospital, Auckland, New Zealand.
G H
GH
Taylor
H H
HH
Rea
S
S
McNaughton
L
L
Smith
J
J
Mulder
M I
MI
Asher
E A
EA
Mitchell
E
E
Seelve
A W
AW
Stewart
D001249:Asthma / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy*; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006701:Home Nursing / Q000379:methods* / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D015588:Observer Variation; D010353:Patient Education as Topic / Q000379:methods*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D012648:Self Care / Q000379:methods* / Q000523:psychology; D012803:Sick Role