IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v29y1989i2p171-183.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Self-care among older adults

Author

Listed:
  • Haug, Marie R.
  • Wykle, May L.
  • Namazi, Kevan H.

Abstract

Defining self-care as treatment for a perceived symptom, this paper posits that explanations for such illness behavior will differ depending on whether symptoms experienced are perceived as not serious and most amenable to self-treatment or more serious and less likely to respond to self-care. Borrowing from the Health Belief Model, two major concepts, a health set (consisting of five measures of perceived physical and mental health) and an attitude set (comprising four indicators of belief in physician efficacy) are included to explain rates of self-care across all reported symptoms. Self-care rate, calculated as the percentage of experienced symptoms self-treated without professional advice, was slightly higher for persons whose symptoms were seen as less serious. Measures of self-assessed health were related to self-care for those less severe symptoms, while lower faith in doctors as well as health were more closely related to the ailments perceived as more serious. Implications of the results for further studies are discussed.

Suggested Citation

  • Haug, Marie R. & Wykle, May L. & Namazi, Kevan H., 1989. "Self-care among older adults," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 29(2), pages 171-183, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:29:y:1989:i:2:p:171-183
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(89)90165-2
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Olafsdottir, Sigrun & Pescosolido, Bernice A., 2011. "Constructing illness: How the public in eight Western nations respond to a clinical description of "schizophrenia"," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 73(6), pages 929-938, September.
    2. Ferda Erdem & Murat Atalay, 2017. "The effect of health transformation policies on the resident physicians' perception of the medical profession in Turkey," International Journal of Health Planning and Management, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(2), pages 189-216, April.
    3. Peri J. Ballantyne & Joan A. Marshman & Philippa J. Clarke & J. Charles Victor, 2003. "Use of Medicines by Community Dwelling Elderly in Ontario," Social and Economic Dimensions of an Aging Population Research Papers 103, McMaster University.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:29:y:1989:i:2:p:171-183. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.