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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/18596 |
| Date | 02 1900 |
| Creators | Janela, Carlos M. |
| Contributors | Draucker, Claire Burke, Carpenter, Janet S., Oruche, Ukamaka M., Minor, Kyle S. |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
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