Culture, the Meaning of Personal Control and Health

文化、个人控制与健康的意义

• 批准号: 6439859
• 负责人: MARILYN M SKAFF
• 金额: $ 7.38万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN FRANCISCO
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-09-30 至 2003-09-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/6439859
• 关键词: African American; Hispanic Americans; attitude; behavioral /social science research tag; caucasian American; clinical research; culture; geriatrics; health behavior; human old age (65+); human subject; interview; locus of control; model design /development; psychological aspect of aging; psychological models; psychometrics; quality of life; racial /ethnic difference; self concept

In order to understand the factors that contribute to health and well-being of older people in our increasingly diverse population, we need to identify constructs that help explain variations in health. Considerable evidence has accumulated over the past several decades regarding the importance of individuals' sense of control for their mental and physical health. In general, this influence may operate through the ways in which people appraise health situations, how much influence they feel they can have on their health, and on the specific behaviors they engage in to protect or improve their health. Further, sense of control has been proposed as a major mediating variable that may help explain the link between social structure and health. As with most of our personality constructs, however, measures of control have been established based on European American beliefs about control, and measured with instruments developed on European American samples. To ascertain whether sense of control has the same meaning across diverse ethnic groups, qualitative interviews will be conducted with African Americans, Latinos, and European Americans, age 65 and older. As a working hypothesis, the proposed study assumes that personal control is a multi-dimensional construct and that similarities and differences across groups may exist within each of the dimensions. Specifically, it is anticipated that culture will influence the meaning and interpretation of the following: 1) the controllability of life in general and of health specifically; 2) the agents of control: whether individualistic or collective; 3) the means of control, i.e., the ways one goes about controlling aspects of one's life; and 4) the targets of control. The goals of these analyses are threefold: 1) to shed light on the cultural appropriateness of currently used constructs and measures of sense of control; 2) to aid in interpreting the information we now collect regarding sense of control and its relationship to health across diverse groups; and 3) potentially, to lead to modification of existing measures or development of new, more culturally sensitive measures that better represent the variations in meaning and manifestations of sense of control. The knowledge gained from these analyses is expected to lead directly to a study of control and health in an ethnically diverse sample of older adults with chronic illnesses.

为了了解在我们日益多样化的人口中有助于老年人健康和福祉的因素，我们需要确定有助于解释健康变化的结构。在过去几十年中积累了大量证据，证明个人的控制感对身心健康的重要性。一般来说，这种影响可能通过人们评价健康状况的方式来发挥作用，他们认为自己对健康有多大影响，以及他们为保护或改善健康而采取的具体行为。此外，控制感被认为是一个主要的中介变量，可能有助于解释社会结构和健康之间的联系。然而，与我们大多数的人格结构一样，控制的测量是基于欧洲美国人关于控制的信念建立的，并使用欧洲美国人样本开发的工具进行测量。为了确定控制感在不同种族群体中是否具有相同的意义，将对65岁及以上的非裔美国人、拉丁美洲人和欧洲裔美国人进行定性访谈。作为一个工作假设，拟议中的研究假设，个人控制是一个多维度的结构和跨组的相似性和差异可能存在于每个维度。具体而言，预计文化将影响以下内容的含义和解释：1）一般生活和具体健康的可控性; 2）控制的代理人：无论是个人的还是集体的; 3）控制的手段，即，一个人如何控制自己生活的各个方面; 4）控制的目标。这些分析的目的有三个：1）阐明目前使用的控制感结构和测量的文化适当性; 2）帮助解释我们现在收集的关于不同群体的控制感及其与健康的关系的信息;和3）潜在地，导致修改现有措施或开发新的，对文化更敏感的措施，更好地体现控制感的含义和表现形式的差异。从这些分析中获得的知识，预计将直接导致控制和健康的研究，在一个种族多样性的样本老年人慢性疾病。