The effect of pulmonary T . B . patients' self - concept and health beliefs on therapeutic behavior

Sim, Young Ok

Abstract

The proportion of people who contacted pulmonary T.B. in Korea has drastically decreased as a result of the incessant effort of the Korean government which adopted a policy of "drive out T.B." as its foremost health policy. However, the proportion still remains relatively high compared with that of developed countries. This study attempts to find some means for guiding and educating college students who have T.B. in their health care by (1) first determining the effect of their self-concept and health beliefs on their behavior in regard to their disease and (2) then predicting the level of compliance of the new patients to the treatment suggested by the health specialist, before the commencement of the treatment. The subjects of this study consisted of 88 mald and female students at Y University who were diagnosed as minimal pulmonary T.B. patients and registered at the health clinic of Y University during the period between September 1, 1981 and March 31, 1983. Data were collected from them by means of questionnaire and interview. The instruments used for this study were (1) a part of Junghoon choi's "Perceptual Orientation Scale" for measuring self-perception of patients and (2) Rosenberg's questionnaire for measuring patients evaluation of self-esteem, and (3) an instrument for measuring patients health beliefs which was developed by this researcher utilizing information available from references. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, chisquare test, Pearson correlation coefficient. and t-test. The findings were as follows: 1. Test of hypotheses 1) Hypothesis 1: Patients with high self-concept will be high in health beliefs. For testing this hypothesis a calculation of Pearson correlation coefficient(r) between the patients' self-concept and their health beliefs was carried out. The result of this test was -. 0756 which was not significant at a=. 05 and hence hypothesis 1 was not supported. 2) Hypothesis 2: Patients with a high self-concept will tend to be high in compliance with the suggested treatment. Again a Pearson correlaton coefficient was calculated between the two variaibles in the hypothesis. The calculated coefficient r was . 1558 which was not significant at alpha=. 05. Hence hypothesis 2 was rejected. 3) Hypothesis 3: Patients with high susceptibility will have a high compliance level. The correlation coefficient between the two variables was - .1975, which was significant at alpha=. 05 but due to the negative sign hypothesis 3 could not be accepted. 4) Hypothesis 4: Patients who take their disease seriously will have a higher compliance level. The calculated correlation coefficient between the variables in this hypothesis was . 1642 which was not significant at alpha=. 05 and hence hypothesis 4 was rejected. 5) Hypothesis 5: Patients with a high sense of the benefit of treatment will have a high level of compliance. The computed correlation coefficient was .3129 which was significant at alpha=. 05 and hence hypothesis 5 was acepted. 2. Findings from the correlation analysis were as follows: 1) Patients susceptibility and their compliance to treatment was negatively correlated (r=.1975) which was significant at alpha=. 05. This implies that as the patients level of susceptibility increases their compliance level decreases. 2) Patients susceptibility and their self-concept were negatively correlated (r=-.1790) which was again singnificant at alpha=.05. The implication of this is that as the patients self-concept increases their susceptibility to disease decreases. 3) Patients' self-concept and their sense of benefit derieved from the treatment was positively correlated (r=.1970) which was significant at alpha=.05. That is, patients with a high self concept perceived a great sense of benefit from the treatment. To summarize, patients who are low in susceptibility have a high level of compliance and self -concept.