Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness that significantly lessens health-related quality of life (HRQoL). A better understanding of HRQoL is needed to inform holistic and patient-centered treatments for schizophrenia. The purpose of this dissertation is to conduct an in-depth exploration of HRQoL in people with schizophrenia. The dissertation includes three components. The first component is an integrative literature review aimed at identifying factors associated with physical quality of life (QoL) in people with schizophrenia. The review reveals that symptoms of schizophrenia, depression, obesity or body mass index, and physical activity are associated with physical QoL in this population. The second and third components are based on illness narratives of 20 people with schizophrenia who had participated in a larger study of individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness. The second component of the dissertation is a qualitative descriptive study conducted to describe common HRQoL concerns in people with schizophrenia. The results indicate that these concerns were related to social relationships, psychiatric symptoms, psychiatric care, and employment. The third component of the dissertation is a parallel convergent mixed-methods study conducted to explore whether computerized lexical analysis (CLA) of illness narratives of people with schizophrenia can reveal their HRQoL concerns. CLA is an automatized process that counts words in text data and sorts them into pre-defined word categories. The results provide preliminary support for the potential use of CLA to efficiently assess HRQoL in people with schizophrenia as the CLA identified some of the HRQoL concerns that had been identified in the prior qualitative descriptive study. The results of the three studies reveal the complexity of the phenomenon of HRQoL in people with schizophrenia and can inform the development of strategies to identify and promote HRQoL in this population.

The diploma work is focused on importance of movement activities for seniors. The movement represents the basic manifestation of life, influences the physical health, helps psychologically and reduces psychical problems. Ageing is a process which runs individually and during which the human organism goes through certain changes. Everyone, who works with seniors, should be familiar with basic information about the ageing process. Physical activities are fundamental for this age group, they maintain the physical ability and the psychical immunity. They help handling everyday situations. In order that the exercises had the desired result, it is necessary to follow certain conventions and respect individual differences. The task of the people working with senior is to motivate them enough. Nowadays, we can find a large offer of appropriate physical activities which aim at a self-sufficient and happy senior life.