Diabetes Mellitus is a complex chronic disease that is prevalent throughout the world (Wild, Roglic, Green, Sicree, & King, 2004). People living with this disease are confronted with lifestyle modifications that require daily attention to a myriad of self care behaviors and health practices. Adherence to these self care recommendations can prevent the devastating complications that are associated with diabetes (UKPDS Group, 1998; Stratton, Adler, Neil, et al., 2000). Though knowledge plays an important role in the self management of diabetes, education alone does not ensure adherence to life-long behavior changes (Norris, Lau, Smith, Schmid, & Engelgau, 2002; Krichbaum, Aarestad, Buethe, 2003). It is recognized that additional research is needed to understand barriers and facilitators to behavior change. Studies have identified that people with diabetes have worries about their disease and specific sources of worries include worries about being able to carry out family responsibilities in the future, worries about their financial future, worries about weight, and worries about risk for hypoglycemia (Peyrot, Rubin, Lauritzen, Snoek, Matthews, & Skovlund, 2005). Investigation into the effects of worry on health has focused primarily on worry's motivational properties and little is known about how worry impacts self management adherence in the diabetic population. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between worry, self efficacy and adherence to self management recommendations in the API diabetic population. An analysis of data previously collected from a two arm randomized controlled intervention trial (ENHANCE project) was undertaken to answer the research questions. The findings of this study suggest that levels of and types of worry have an effect on self efficacy and on self management adherence. Social worries had a direct effect on self efficacy and positively moderated self efficacy's impact on self management adherence. Disease specific worries had a negative direct effect on self efficacy and negatively moderated self efficacy's effect on adherence. In addition, our study supported the understanding that worry perception and impact may differ among ethnic groups. The Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders in our study experienced less worries as measured by our social worry tools than the Asian participants.

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / abstract / Social Work and Social Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Feminist and social historians have long been interested in that particularly female ability to become pregnant and bear children. A significant body of historiography has challenged the notion that pregnancy and childbirth considered to be the acceptable and 'appropriate' roles for women for most of the twentieth century in Australia - have always been welcomed, rewarding and always fulfilling events in women's lives. Several historians have also begun the process of enlarging our knowledge of the changing cultural attitudes towards bereavement in Australia and the eschewing of the public expression of sorrow following the two World Wars; a significant contribution to scholarship which underscores the changing attitudes towards perinatal loss. It is estimated that one in four women lose a pregnancy to miscarriage, and two in one hundred late pregnancies result in stillbirth in contemporary Australia. Miscarriage, stillbirth and neonatal death are today considered by psychologists and social workers, amongst others, as potentially significant events in many women's lives, yet have received little or passing attention in historical scholarship concerned with pregnancy and motherhood. As such, this study focuses on pregnancy loss: the meaning it has been given by various groups at different times in Australia's past, and how some Australian women have made sense of their own experience of miscarriage, stillbirth or neonatal death within particular social and historical contexts. Pregnancy loss has been understood in a range of ways by different groups over the past 100 years. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when alarm was mounting over the declining birth rate, pregnancy loss was termed 'foetal wastage' by eugenicists and medical practitioners, and was seen in abstract terms as the loss of necessary future Australian citizens. By the 1970s, however, with the advent of support groups such as SANDS (Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Support) miscarriage and stillbirth were increasingly seen as the devastating loss of an individual baby, while the mother was seen as someone in need of emotional and other support. With the advent of new prenatal screening technologies in the late twentieth century, there has been a return of the idea of maternal responsibility for producing a 'successful' outcome. This project seeks to critically examines the wide range of socially constructed meanings of pregnancy loss and interrogate the arguments of those groups, such as the medical profession, religious and support groups, participating in these constructions. It will build on existing histories of motherhood, childbirth and pregnancy in Australia and, therefore, also the history of Australian women.

盧淑櫻. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-248) / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / Lu Shuying.