[Qualitative analysis of subjective concepts of illness]

Patients' subjective concepts of illness play an important role in the progress and outcome of psychotherapeutic treatment. Therefore, their reliable and valid assessment is of high practical value. The subject of this article is the development and validation of a system of categories for the qualitative evaluation of open answers in a newly developed questionnaire for concepts of illness by Bischoff, Husen, Reichel and Schaefer (in preparation). The new instrument consists of an open and a closed part for assessing subjective concepts of illness. In order to evaluate the open answers a system of classification was constructed following to the principles of qualitative content analysis. Therefore, the answers were summarized into subcategories according to their topics. The subcategories again were assigned to major categories. Major categories emerged to be "unfavourable life circumstances", "interpersonal problems", "intrapersonal problems", "somatic/physical problems" as well as a residual category for unscorable answers. Besides examining the adequacy of the constructed categories and their reliability several hypotheses of validity were derived and empirically tested. It was possible to develop a categorical system for daily practical use which is able to assess contents of subjective concepts of illness.