Causal Attribution and Life-Threatening Disease

Abstract

When individuals are confronted with a diagnosis of serious disease, they try to understand why it has happened to them. The degree to which any individual can control his or her susceptibility to disease is not clear, but different diseases carry with them varying degrees of implied personal responsibility. For example, certain diseases (heart attack, stroke, cancer) have associated risk factors. Presumably, avoiding these risk factors will have some effect on a person's chance of developing those diseases. The purpose of this secondary analysis was to describe patients' attributed causes for two groups of individuals recently diagnosed with either lung cancer or myocardial infarction. Content analysis was done on the responses to an open-ended question about the cause of their disease for 108 subjects at Interview 1 and for 100 subjects at Interview 2.

The most frequent causal explanations given by post myocardial infarction subjects in this study were related to life style, which could be interpreted as self-blame or self responsibility for what had happened to them. In contrast, the subjects with lung cancer more consistently said that they did not know what caused their disease, or mentioned a combination of life style (smoking) and external factors (exposure to noxious fumes or asbestos).

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