HEALTH PROMOTION FOR PEOPLE WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS AND PHYSICAL-DISABILITIES - THE CONNECTION BETWEEN HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY AND DISABILITY PREVENTION

People who have disabilities from injury or chronic illness are at ris k for a variety of secondary conditions that can add to the level of d isability they experience. Health promotion interventions for people w ith disabilities have the potential to decrease the incidence and seve rity of these secondary conditions, but little research has developed models of intervention that specifically address the needs of this pop ulation. Two studies were conducted to investigate the utility of inte grating the Sense of Coherence (Antonovsky, 1987) and Attribution Styl e (Abramson et al., 1978) models into a health promotion intervention for people with disabilities. The first study suggested that 45% of th e variance in a measure of secondary condition severity could be accou nted for by measures of depression, Sense of Coherence and Attribution al Style. The second study, a quasi-experimental treatment evaluation, indicated that a health promotion intervention for people with spinal cord injury based on these models resulted in a 37% decrease in repor ted limitation due to secondary conditions in the treatment group. Com bined, the results from these two studies suggest a promising treatmen t paradigm for conducting health promotion with people who have disabi lities. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.