[Developing a scale of self-management behaviors of parents with asthmatic children in Taiwan through triangulation...

The purposes of this study were to develop a scale of self-management behaviors for parents with asthmatic children by qualitative and quantitative methods. This research included two phases: (1) to explore the self-management behaviors of successfully managing parents with asthmatic children by in-depth interviewing method. (2) To examine the reliability and validity of self-management behaviors by the quantitative survey of 133 outpatient parents with asthmatic children. The results including four categories, 10 items and 23 self-management behaviors units were inducted from the 16 parents. The four categories are named as (1) Preventive behaviors: controlling environmental factors, taking drugs, avoiding the causes of allergy, improving the body's defenses; (2) Managing behaviors: making decision based on the severity, taking pharmacological management for attacks, and selecting non-pharmacological management for attacks; (3) Assessing behaviors: observing and comparing the symptoms/signs themselves; (4) Alternative treatment. The survey research was conducted with 21 self-management behaviors after refinement by 10 experts. Based on the survey of 133 parents with asthmatic children, the reliability of the scale was shown as Cronbach's alpha .88. The construct validity was established by factor analysis by rotation method with Varimax with Kaiser normalization. Three extracting components were named as preventing behaviors, managing behaviors and assessing behaviors. The cumulative percent of variance of 3 factors was 48.2%.