Health promotion for people with chronic illness and physical disabilities: the connection between health psychology and disability prevention

Abstract

People who have disabilities from injury or chronic illness are at risk for a variety of secondary conditions that can add to the level of disability they experience. Health promotion interventions for people with disabilities have the potential to decrease the incidence and severity of these secondary conditions, but little research has developed models of intervention that specifically address the needs of this population. Two studies were conducted to investigate the utility of integrating the Sense of Coherence (Antonovsky, 1987) and Attribution Style (Abramson et al., 1978) models into a health promotion intervention for people with disabilities. The first study suggested that 45% of the variance in a measure of secondary condition severity could be accounted for by measures of depression, Sense of Coherence and Attributional Style. The second study, a quasi-experimental treatment evaluation, indicated that a health promotion intervention for people with spinal cord injury based on these models resulted in a 37% decrease in reported limitation due to secondary conditions in the treatment group. Combined, the results from these two studies suggest a promising treatment paradigm for conducting health promotion with people who have disabilities. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.