Insights from latent partition analysis into categories inherent in wellness-illness

How health-disease is perceived or conceptualized is important for nursing research. There is increasing evidence that individual representations are important in constructing the experience of health-disease. What is the personal saliency of health-disease for the individual? To explore the patterns of meaning inherent in health-disease, a card sort was undertaken among 15 healthy individuals and 15 individuals with chronic renal disease. Both groups were given 28 cards to sort twice: once for when they felt 'well' and again for when they felt 'ill'. The theoretical basis underlying the items of the card sort was a model of wellness-illness being developed. Latent partition analysis was used to cluster the concepts from each data set followed by multi-dimensional scaling to analyse the structure of the intercategory probability estimates. A possible unidimensional pattern of meaning (harmony) emerged for the 'well' data and a two-dimensional pattern (disharmony and optimism) for the 'ill' data. This represents a preliminary step in the development of a theoretical model that would permit assessment of the meaning of health-disease for the individual.