Lau R R, Bernard T M, Hartman K A
Department of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890.
Health Psychol. 1989;8(2):195-219. doi: 10.1037//0278-6133.8.2.195.
A simple method is presented for measuring people's illness cognitions--their common-sense representations of common illnesses. Data were collected from 1,628 different respondents who described a recent illness form 1 to 3 separate times over a 17-month period. A free-clustering task performed by a set of naive participants confirmed that these cognitions fall into the five components that have been previously noted: identity, time line, consequences, cause, and cure. These five components are found to be reasonably stable over time and across different illness episodes. Several consequences of these illness cognitions, in terms of changes in health-locus-of-control beliefs and different propensities to visit a doctor, are also noted. Specifically, controllable attributions for getting sick and personal responsibility attributions for getting better are associated with increased beliefs in Self-Control Over Health and decreased beliefs in Chance Health Outcomes; people with strong Identity and Cure components in their common-sense representations of common illnesses have a greater propensity to visit a doctor when feeling ill.
本文提出了一种测量人们疾病认知——即他们对常见疾病的常识性认知——的简单方法。数据收集自1628名不同的受访者，他们在17个月的时间里分1至3次描述了最近患的疾病。一组普通参与者进行的自由聚类任务证实，这些认知可分为先前已指出的五个组成部分：疾病特性、时间线、后果、病因和治疗。研究发现，这五个组成部分在不同时间和不同疾病发作过程中都相当稳定。本文还指出了这些疾病认知在健康控制源信念变化和看医生的不同倾向方面的一些后果。具体而言，对生病的可控归因和对康复的个人责任归因与对健康自我控制的信念增加以及对偶然健康结果的信念降低有关；在对常见疾病的常识性认知中，具有强烈疾病特性和治疗组成部分的人在感到不适时看医生的倾向更大。
