Abstract
Primary Author and Speaker: Sangmi Park
Additional Authors and Speakers: Ji-Hyuk Park
People in the early period of the adult age are suffering from academic and employment stress, long working hours, and role conflict between family and work. The concept of Occupational Balance(OB) could be used to keep or improve clients’ health and quality of life. OB has a potential as therapeutic method, but it has a difficulty in using actively in occupational therapy practice because of lack of evaluation tools and problems not distinguishing from similar concepts like participation, role balance, work-life balance and so on. Although previous studies reported correlation between OB and health related components, there is little evidence on causal effects of concept of OB for health promotion or quality of life. The purpose of the study is to find the evidence of therapeutic use of concept of OB for health promotion and to investigate the similarities and differences between concept of OB and participation by analyzing causal effects of OB on participation, health, quality of life, and stress using path analysis.
90 adults aged over 19 participated in this quantitative method study. Excepting outliers, 83 self-reported data were analyzed. Participants were recruited through nonprobable quota sampling. Sampling categories were university students, unmarried and married employees, and housewives. Community dwelling adults who can engage in daily activities independently and answer the self-reported questionnaire were included.
Five quantitative measures, Korean version of Life Balance Inventory(K-LBI), Korean Utrecht Scale for Evaluation of Rehabilitation-Participation(K-USER-P), Korean version of WHO Quality of Life-Brief(WHOQOL-BREF), Korean version of Short Form-12 Health Survey Questionnaire version 2(SF-12v2), and 4 questions-stress questionnaire were used. Quantitative measures were statistically analyzed with SPSS and AMOS. Hypothesized model for path analysis was based on International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health(ICF) model. Final model was selected by more of significant paths and better model fit among hypothesized model and two alternative models.
32 males and 51 females participated in the research and average age of the participants was 30.88±7.61. There were 48 married people among 83 participants. Correlation coefficient between OB and participation was r=.714(p=.000). As the average variance extracted of OB(.687) was bigger than the square of the correlation coefficient between OB and participation(.509), it was found that there is a discriminant validity between concept of OB and participation. OB had no direct effect on health, quality of life, and stress, excepting participation. Direct effect of OB on satisfaction of participation was .440 and on frequency of participation was .309. It was found that OB has effect on quality of life, physical health, mental health, and stress indirectly through participation. Total effect of OB to quality of life was .330(p=.004), physical health was -.127(p=.002), mental health was .169(p=.004), and stress was -.197(p=.002).
OB had correlation with participation and influenced participation, quality of life, health and stress of a sample group. This could be an evidence to use concept of OB in intervention for health promotion and improving quality of life of people in adulthood. As the participants were adults living independently in community setting, the result has a possibility of applying concept of OB to preventative approaches for general adults without disabilities. But it is needed to develop practical intervention using concept of OB. This study has a limitation of small sample size compared to the common path analysis study. Further research with bigger sample and other age group is needed to identify the generalizability of the results.
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