The Impacts of Psycho-Social-Spiritual Factors on Health-Related Quality of Life Among Chinese Older Adults with Visual Problems

Download or read book The Impacts of Psycho-Social-Spiritual Factors on Health-Related Quality of Life Among Chinese Older Adults with Visual Problems written by Chongwen Wang and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-27 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Impacts of Psycho-social-spiritual Factors on Health-related Quality of Life Among Chinese Older Adults With Visual Problems" by Chongwen, Wang, 汪崇文, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract of thesis entitled "The Impacts of Psycho-Social-Spiritual Factors on Health-Related Quality of Life among Chinese Older Adults with Visual Problems" Submitted by Wang Chongwen for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in October, 2006 It has been suggested that adaptation to chronic illnesses may be affected by psychosocial factors, especially individuals' cognitive appraisal, spirituality, and social resources. Vision loss in later life is a stressful chronic condition. With the aging of population, age-related vision loss is becoming more prevalent in China. This study examined the relationships between visual function, cognitive appraisal, social network, spirituality, and vision-targeted health-related quality of life (HRQOL) as well as general health among Chinese older adults with vision impairment. A quantitative survey with cross-sectional design was adopted in the present study. A total of 167 older adults with visual problems aged 60 or above (mean = 76.2, SD = 6.5) were recruited from two public geriatric hospitals in Wuhan City, Mainland China. Face-to-face interviews with structured questionnaires were conducted with each subject. All instruments adopted had satisfactory or acceptable reliability. The effects of both objective and subjective measures of visual function on HRQOL were examined and compared first in this study, and objective measure of visual function was selected as the key variable to test major hypotheses. The findings indicated that cognitive appraisal, social network, and spirituality were significantly related to indicators of vision-targeted HRQOL, and that cognitive appraisal and spirituality were also significantly related to general health, after visual function and demographic variables were controlled for. Different factors were significantly related to different particular domains of HRQOL. The results further indicated that cognitive appraisal and spirituality acted as partial mediators in specific relationship between visual function and a domain of vision-targeted HRQOL, i.e., mental health symptoms due to visual problems, and that spirituality also acted as a partial mediator in the linkage between visual function and general mental health, suggesting that the mediating effects of cognitive appraisal and spirituality were not only decided by functional status, but also dependent upon which domain of HRQOL was to be measured. The findings also indicated that cognitive appraisal exhibited a moderating effect in the linkage between visual function and vision-targeted HRQOL including social function, mental health, and dependency domains, and in the linkage between visual function and general mental health. Social network exhibited only direct effect on vision-targeted HRQOL and general health in the study. On the whole, this study highlights the importance of the psycho-social-spiritual factors and their roles in adaptation to age-related vision loss. Our findings suggest that psycho-socio-spiritual factors have definite impacts on vision-targeted HRQOL and general health among Chinese older adults with visual problems. Implications for public policy and services, clinical professionals, social workers, health caregivers and older adults were discussed and future research directions and approaches were suggested. ii DOI: 10.5353