Older Adult’s Knowledge and Coping Behaviors of Knee Osteoarthritis in Taiwan：Scale Development and Preliminary Evidence of Reliability and Validity

• Main Authors: Wen-Qian Luo, 羅文忏
• Other Authors: 陳毓璟
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9z8bb2

碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 心理學研究所 === 101 === Since Taiwan turned into an aging society; Knee Osteoarthritis becomes one of the most common chronic diseases in elder generations. Nowadays, OA is the major cause of pain and disability to aged people; It not only influences them physically and psychologically, but also makes great impact to their social health. Accordingly, to enhance illness management, health care interventions should concentrate on the spread of knee Osteoarthritis illness knowledge. This study uses the common sense model for developing knowledge and coping questionnaire of the knee osteoarthritis issue in Taiwan. Consideration of the low level of literacy of the elder, the measurement procedure was established in spoken version (Minnan). Furthermore, it was special designed for senior people, so they can easily understand questions and write down the answer as well. A total of 281 participants were collected from Chiayi, Taiwan. The collection data were analyzed by item analysis, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results support the four factors of knowledge and two factors of coping. There are three subscales with good reliability and validity, which are about “symptoms” in knowledge scale, “problem-focused coping” and “emotion-focused coping” in coping scale. However, there are some bad items effects the reliability and validity to the following three subscales in the knowledge scale: “timeline’, “cause” and “control and cure”. The majority of the patients have a high awareness about symptoms and cause. Their average accuracy rate were over 80%. Nevertheless, the confused timeline, control and cure average accuracy rate were only 55%. Their coping behavior preferences were rest and avoiding any behavior that may causes pain; Secondary medical treatment or taking medicine. There are two results about coping behaviors were affected by illness knowledge. First of all, the effects of illness symptoms knowledge and coping are mediated by emotion. Secondly, the more they know about disease control and cure of knee OA knowledge, the more they show the coping behavior. This questionnaire will be used to clarify the degree of knee osteoarthritis knowledge in older adult’s. In the future, health care workers could use this questionnaire to understand the patients’ knowledge of knee OA and design health education programs, thus enhancing the self-care ability of patients.