Research On The Relationship Between Social Support, Psychological Flexibility And Quality Of Life Of AIDS Patients

This study has selected 310 AIDS patients from a special AIDS hospital and some foundation's AIDS-funded project to conduct questionnaire survey by using social support scale,psychological elasticity scale and quality of life scale.SPSS 21.0 was used to explore the differences in demographic variables among social support,psychological elasticity and quality of life.Then we used AMOS 21.0 to construct the structural equation model for the relationship among them,and further explored the acting path among the three factors.The results are shown:The level of social support for AIDS patients was significantly lower than the national norm.The support from these people with high education is higher than that of those with low educational background in the aspect of subjective support and its availability.The social support level for the urban patients was higher than that for the rural patients.These AIDS patients with divorce status get less social support than those unmarried or married persons.Subjects with divorced parents got higher social support than those who had divorced their parents;subjects who were infected by blood can get a higher level of social support than those who were infected by sexual actions.The level of psychological elasticity of AIDS patients was lower than that of the national norm(P<0.001).In the "toughness" and "strength" dimension,the psychological elasticity of AIDS patients with master's degree and above is significantly higher than that of other groups.The psychological elasticity of married persons is significantly higher than that of unmarried persons.The psychological elasticity of homosexual groups is significantly higher than that of heterosexual groups in the strength dimension.The quality of life of AIDS patients was significantly lower than that of the general population(p<0.01)in all dimensions.People with master's degree and above can get a higher quality of life that those people who just have got primary,junior or high school degree in the social or environmental field;in the dimension of field of life,patients from unmarried groups can get a higher social support than those from divorced groups;people from urban groups can get higher social support than those from rural groups in the field of life.There existed a positive correlation among AIDS patients' psychological flexibility,patients'social support and quality of lif'e of AIDS patients,among which there was a low level of positive correlation between social support factors and quality of life of AIDS patients.Psychological elasticity and quality of life factors were moderately positive correlated.For those AIDS patients,social support plays a positive predictive role in the quality of life(P<0.01);psychological elasticity had positive predictive effect on the quality of life(P<0.001);social support had a positive predictive effect on the psychological elasticity as well(P<0.001).The data analysis method of structural equation model is used to explore the psychological elasticity intermediary relation between social support and quality of life.In the AIDS groups,psychological elasticity has already played an intermediary effect on social support and quality of lives.Social support can directly affect the quality of lives and also indirectly affect the quality of lives through the kind of mediator variable,psychological elasticity.And all various dimensions from psychological elasticity have different regulating effects and various acting paths.