THE MENTAL ADJUSTMENT TO HIV SCALE - MEASUREMENT AND DIMENSIONS OF RESPONSE TO AIDS HIV DISEASE

Attitudes of people with HIV disease towards HIV have seldom been meas ured. However, a well-established scale to measure attitudes toward ca ncer in those with the disease, the 38-item Mental Adjustment to Cance r (MAC) scale was modified to assess adjustment to HIV disease. We adm inistered the scale to 107 Australian men with HIV infection, of whom 36 had an AIDS-defining condition, who were patients at an ambulatory care facility and in a research study. The data were factor analyzed u sing a method identical to that used in the development of the MAC sca le to determine the latent dimensions of attitudes toward HIV/AIDS. Th e Mental Adjustment to HIV scale (MAH) factor analysis revealed five f actors: Helplessness-Hopelessness, Fighting Spirit, and Denial-Avoidan ce as in the original MAC scale, plus a Fatalism subscale which also m easured Preoccupation, and a new subscale, which measured Belief in In fluencing the Course of the Disease. Together, these five factors acco unted for half of the variance. These data suggest that while there ar e similarities between mental attitude to cancer and mental attitude t o HIV in the latent dimensions of the questionnaire items, there are a lso some differences. Most significant is the belief in people with HI V disease in being able to personally influence the course of the illn ess, and the combination of Preoccupation with Fatalism. The five subs cales of the MAH scale had Cronbach's alpha reliabilities between 0.80 and 0.55. The MAH appears to be a useful way to measure total attitud es and subscale scores of people with HIV infection, including AIDS, t o their disease.