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Compliance to self-care of diabetes is affected by social environmental variables and by internal personal variables. Compliance with self care is extremely important as it has a material effect on blood-glucose levels and on the future physical complications that the diabetes patient will contract in the future. The goal of the research is to examine the contribution of the sense of coherence and the quality of the subject's coupledom to successfully coping with diabetes and better compliance with self care. The goal is to examine which variables affect treatment compliance in the best manner, and why.
The research will examine these hypotheses from a subject pool of 100 patients of "Maccabbi Medical Services" by gathering data through the following questionnaires: the quality of the coupledom will be examined by the short form of the "[Quality of Marriage Scale]" (Lavy, 1995); the self sense of coherence will be examined with Antonovsky's questionnaire (Antonovsky, 1987); compliance with self care will be measured by "the Summary of Diabetes Self-Care Activities Measure" (Toobert, Hampson & Glasgow, 2000), which examines the subject's self care in the seven days prior to completing the questionnaire; the perception of illness with be examined with the "Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (Broadbent, Petrie, Main & Weinman, 2006); demographic and medical details will be acquired from the subject's medical file (HA1C, BMI and the number of years since diagnosis of the disease).
The effect of coupledom on compliance to self care has not been sufficiently researched. In self care, the contact of the medical professionals with the patient typically does not include the patient's family, and the spouse does not generally play a part in the treatment. The examination of additional psycho-social variables can add relevant information on the variables which affect the success of self care, providing aid to the medical care-giver in planning medical support services which is in-line with the patient's personal and environmental needs and hence making the medical treatment more efficient.
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