Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
items are rated on a 4-point Likert scale. The third one was the HIV
Stigma Scale (Sowell et al., 1997), a 13-item scale with three
subscales (distancing, blaming, and discrimination). A single–item
quality of life question was added to assess the participants’ overall
perception of their quality of life, rated on a 5-point Likert scale.
Participants were also asked about their demographic
characteristics.
The questionnaire was translated to Arabic, back translated to
English, and validated for cultural appropriateness by a panel of
experts.
Statistical analysis
Descriptive statistics included means, standard deviation (SD) and
frequencies. Bivariate analyses used were t-test, ANOVA, chi
square, and correlation coefficients.
Results
Fifty seven questionnaires were distributed and 41 returned,
yielding a 71.92% response rate. The majority of the sample were
males (77.5%), single (46.3%), with up to secondary level
education (43.8%). The mean age was 38 years (SD=9.93). The
subjects were equally distributed between working full time (43.9%)
and unemployed (43.9%), and only 32.5% had health insurance.
Over half of the participants (57.5%) reported being asymptomatic
HIV positive patients but 22.5% did not know in which stage they
were. Also 34.1% of participants reported not knowing their HIV
mode of transmission.
The mean MQoL-HIV was 176.85 (SD=39.66). The MQoL-HIV
domain scores ranged from 4 to 28. The highest score was for the
cognitive functioning domain (21.63, SD=5.81), followed by social
functioning (21.10, SD=6.03) and medical care (20.50, SD=6.36);
the lowest domain scores were for the financial status (12.49,
SD=11.00), followed by sexual functioning (14.75, SD=6.65), and
mental health (16.90, SD=5.20). The single item overall quality of
life was reported to be neither poor nor good by 47.5%, good or
very good by 27.5%, and poor or very poor by 25% of the
participants.
The mean Stigma scale score was 25.10 (SD=7.19). Ten
respondents (25.6%) reported that they lost their job because of
HIV/AIDS and they were all males; 33 respondents (80.5%)
reported telling someone that they are infected with HIV/AIDS.
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