Heart failure, a serious and prevalent chronic disease, places a large psychosocial burden on patients and their families. The research presented in this dissertation focuses on the complex relationship between social support and personal control and two key psychological outcomes depression and anxietyin individuals coping with heart failure. Theoretically defensible models are developed, drawing on an integrative stress coping framework, and appropriate inferential statistical procedures are implemented to identify the importance of the proposed relationships in a sample of 242 adult men and women being treated for cardiomyopathy.
Two structural models are evaluated. Model 1 examines the mediating influence of personal control between social support and depression, while Model 2 examines the mediating influence of control between social support and anxiety. Statistically significant estimates indicate that social support plays a key role in reducing psychological distressdepressive symptoms and anxiety. The mechanism whereby social support effectively reduces psychological distress is entirely through patients perceived control.
An additional objective of the study is exploration of gender differences in the two models. A series of empirical analyses, using path analysis and regression-based mediation models, indicate that among heart failure patients there are indeed statistically significant gender differences in the relationships between social support, control, and psychological functioning. These differences were contingent on the measurement of control included in the model. Evidence suggests that the role of social support is greater for women than for men in reducing psychological distress, as indicated by either depressive symptoms or anxiety.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-04212005-115213 |
| Date | 25 April 2005 |
| Creators | Taylor, Melissa Virginia |
| Contributors | Lora Burke, Patricia Bohachick, Susan Sereika, Elizabeth Schlenk, Charlotte Brown |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-04212005-115213/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds