Original articleThe Association of Race, Cultural Factors, and Health-Related Quality of Life in Persons With Spinal Cord Injury
Section snippets
Participants
Data were collected at 6 national SCIMS sites funded by the Department of Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research. The SCIMS are specialized programs of care from across the nation that gather information and conduct research with the goal of improving long-term functional, vocational, cognitive, and QOL outcomes for people with SCI. SCIMS grantees contribute patient records to a national database maintained by a national statistical center that tracks the
Descriptive Data and Race Comparisons for Patient Characteristics and QOL Factors
Table 1 lists descriptive data for the study sample and racial comparisons for demographic, medical, cultural, psychosocial, and QOL factors. In our sample, African Americans had significantly less education, lower levels of employment, and lower total family income. African Americans also were less likely to be married and relied more on public insurance to cover the cost of their SCI care than whites. There were no group differences in numbers of comorbid conditions, years since injury, or
Discussion
The distribution of demographics and medical factors in our sample was similar to that of the SCI population in general.38 In addition, our results were consistent with other work examining race differences in basic demographic and socioeconomic factors, as well as studies examining race differences in perceived discrimination/racism and medical mistrust in health care.15, 16, 21, 27, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43
Our study contributes to this ongoing work by determining how cultural factors vary among
Conclusions
In summary, in our study examining race differences in culturally related characteristics in patients with SCI, we found significant differences between African Americans and whites for key demographic, cultural, and psychosocial factors. Confirming results found in other health care contexts, African Americans with SCI reported experiencing more discrimination and perceived greater racism in health care and had higher levels of health care system distrust and lower health literacy than whites
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2017, Archives of Physical Medicine and RehabilitationCitation Excerpt :Finally, it is noteworthy that no cultural factors or psychosocial characteristics were associated with wheelchair quality for manual or power wheelchair users in our study. This finding was surprising in light of previous work finding positive associations of cultural and psychosocial factors with patient occupational functioning, mobility, and perceived health in nonveterans with SCI.43 The key difference between the current study and previous studies was that our outcome was wheelchair quality as opposed to quality of life.
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Supported by the Department of Education, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research (grant nos. H133N060019, H113N060022, H133N060028) and the Veterans Administration (grant nos. B3142C, MRP04-409, HFP01-063, IIR06-220-3).
No commercial party having a direct financial interest in the results of the research supporting this article has or will confer a benefit on the authors or on any organization with which the authors are associated.
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