Attitudes toward respiratory illness and hospitalization in asthma. Relationships with personality, symptomatology, and treatment response.

A previous study described the development of the Respiratory Illness Opinion Survey (RIOS) which measures six categories describing attitudes toward respiratory illness and its treatment: Optimism, Negative Staff Regard, Specific Internal Awareness, External Control, Psychological Stigma, and Authoritarian Attitudes. In the present study these attitudes were found: a) to relate more clearly to general personality characteristics than to illness-specific subjective symptomatology; b) to enable types of asthmatic patients to be described on the basis of the patterns of attitude category scores; and c) to provide some information about treatment outcome in asthma as indexed by length of hospitalization during long term, intensive therapy, the need for prescribed oral corticosteroids, and rates of rehospitalization and judged severity following discharge from treatment.