This study is aimed at finding the effects of personality and stress-coping style of individual schizophrenia patients on their quality of life. That is, this study investigates how the individual stress-coping style and the five 'sub-factors' of pers...
This study is aimed at finding the effects of personality and stress-coping style of individual schizophrenia patients on their quality of life. That is, this study investigates how the individual stress-coping style and the five 'sub-factors' of personality―agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, extraversion and openness―are related to the quality of the patient's life.
The subjects of the study are 361 schizophrenia patients who are either institutionalized in or regularly visiting 34 social rehabilitation facilities and mental health centers.
The measuring instruments used for the study are the Measurement of Quality of Life developed by Seung-Hee Kook (2001), the Stress-coping Styles Test by Lazarus and Folkman (1985) and the Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness-Personality Inventory(NEO-PI-R) by Costa and McCrae (1985).
The results of this study were as follows:
First, personality explained the schizophrenia patient's quality of life. Especially, the higher conscientiousness and extraversion and lower neuroticism increased quality of life.
Second, the stress-coping style of patients also has an impact on the quality of life. The more the patients use the active coping method, such as problem-focused coping and the pursuit for social support, the higher the quality of their life.
Third, the quality of the patients' life also has an effect on the symptoms of their mental illness. Low emotional and general domains has positive relation to the symptoms of mental illness.
Finally, in the every variables' effects on mental illness, it showed that high neuroticism in personality, low quality of life in emotional and physical domains and the higher use of wishful-thinking method have positive effects on the symptoms of mental illness.