Coping Behavior and Intelligence in the Prediction of Vocational Rehabilitation of Dialysis Patients

Abstract

As part of an intensive psychiatric and psychological examination before starting hemodialysis, forty-seven patients with terminal renal failure, thirty-one men and sixteen women with an age range from the late teens to the mid fifties, had been administered with WBII and the Shanan Sentence Completion technique. The hypothesis was that coping style would predict adaptation to hemodialysis as assessed by vocational rehabilitation. Intelligence, level of education, and the tendency to perceive sources of conflict in the outer world rather than within oneself, were found predictive of subsequent adaptations for the whole group. On all these variables, men and women showed different patterns of significant correlations between the different aspects of coping and vocational rehabilitation. Subsequent multiple step-wise regression showed women (percentage of explained variance: 75) to be more predictable than men (40%) with different variables contributing differentially to predictability. These findings, interpreted to support the general working hypothesis, are discussed in terms of their implications for treatment.