Information sources of self-care strategies for persons living with HIV

A number of studies have been conducted to identify the self-care strategies that are used by persons living with chronic illnesses to manage their symptoms, but little work has been done to identify the primary information source for these self-care strategies.

We conducted an anonymous online survey with 1373 persons living with HIV to identify the self-care strategies they use to manage 28 commonly experienced symptoms. Following their report of their symptoms and self-care strategies, we asked an open-ended question to identify where the participant obtained the information. We applied iterative content analysis of the narrative data and multi-nominal regression to identify which demographic factors were significantly related to each information source category.

Respondents reported a total of 8539 information sources for their self-care strategies categorized as follows: Common sense/Self-experience, Healthcare professional, Internet, Literature, Multiple Sources, Social Support, and TV ads.

We found that respondents with no college education were significantly more likely to report the use of the Internet as the information source for their self-care strategies. On the other hand, males as compared to females were significantly less likely to use the Internet and significantly more likely to use TV ads.