Insights from latent partition analysis into categories inherent in wellness-illness.
How health-disease is perceived or conceptualized is important for nursing research. There is increasing evidence that individual representations are important in constructing the experience of health-disease. What is the personal saliency of health-disease for the individual? To explore the patterns of meaning inherent in health-disease, a card sort was undertaken among 15 healthy individuals and 15 individuals with chronic renal disease. Both groups were given 28 cards to sort twice: once for when they felt 'well' and again for when they felt 'ill'. The theoretical basis underlying the items of the card sort was a model of wellness-illness being developed. Latent partition analysis was used to cluster the concepts from each data set followed by multi-dimensional scaling to analyse the structure of the intercategory probability estimates. A possible unidimensional pattern of meaning (harmony) emerged for the 'well' data and a two-dimensional pattern (disharmony and optimism) for the 'ill' data. This represents a preliminary step in the development of a theoretical model that would permit assessment of the meaning of health-disease for the individual.
Jensen
L
L
Faculty of Nursing, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
Allen
M
M
D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001294:Attitude to Health; D002908:Chronic Disease; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006304:Health Status; D006801:Humans; D007674:Kidney Diseases / Q000451:nursing / Q000523:psychology*; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D016294:Models, Nursing; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009730:Nursing Assessment; D009742:Nursing Theory