The relationships among the subsystems of Johnson's Behavioral System Model

The major premise of the Johnson (1980) Behavioral System Model is that the eight subsystems (domains) are interactive, interdependent and integrated. Relationships among the subsystems were hypothesized, placing the Aggressive/Protective subsystem centrally as having direct and indirect relationships to the other seven subsystems. In the present study, the Behavioral System Model instrument generated two sets of scales that indicated changes as increase or decrease and positive or negative in the subsystem resulting from illness. Two causal models were tested, one for each set of scales, both supporting the hypotheses pertaining to the relationships between the Aggressive/Protective subsystem and the other subsystems. The findings warrant further investigation of these relationships and imply that changes in a domain resulting from illness cannot be well understood without understanding their relationship to changes in other domains.