| dc.description | This exploratory study aimed at developing and evaluating a disease-specific scale that assessed specific psychological barriers that negatively affect self-care behaviours and metabolic control of individuals with diabetes. The psychological barriers of interest included psychological reactance, learned helplessness, and dysfunctional expectations of behaviour change. The first phase of this research involved generating and selecting items. Items were developed using 4 focus group sessions with individuals with diabetes (7 men, 12 women). Participants were asked to report their emotional/behavioural obstacles that they faced when trying to manage their diabetes. Of these, 74% of participants were diagnosed with diabetes type 2, and 26% with diabetes type 1. The generated items were submitted to a panel of 19 experts in a variety of professional fields for review, rating, and revisions. There were 70 items chosen for further validation. The second phase of the study involved a further selection of the items and an evaluation of the reliability of the resulting measure. There were 169 participants (83 men and 86 women) in the study, which involved a completion of 5 questionnaires, including the preliminary measure under investigation, height and weight measurement and most recent A 1C. Nine items with the best psychometric properties were selected for each of the three subscales of the Psychological Barriers Inventory (PBI) on the basis of interpretability, the frequency of endorsement, the exploratory factor analysis and the phenomenological significance of each item. Convergent validity was deemed acceptable. The third phase of the investigation involved evaluating test-retest reliability of the PBI. Test-retest reliability was deemed acceptable for the subscales of Learned Helplessness and Dysfunctional Expectations, and was below acceptable levels for the subscale of Psychological Reactance. The findings indicated positive correlations between the scores on the learned helplessness subscale and A 1C. Negative correlations between participants' age and their scores on reactance and learned helplessness were also found. The PBI was developed to be a clinical tool that can be used by health care professionals helping individuals with diabetes make successful changes in their behaviours. | en_US |
