Effectiveness of Health Promotional Strategies on Quality of Life among Spouse of Alcoholics in Selected Communities of Dakshina Kannada District, India

Abstract

Introduction: Alcoholism is a major problem in developing countries like India. Alcoholism affects not only the individual but also his family and the society. Spouses of alcoholics are among those who suffer the maximum consequences of alcoholism and its effects. Aim: To find the effect of health promotional strategies (Yoga and Health education) on Quality of Life (QOL) of the spouse of alcoholics. Materials and Methods: Quasi experimental pre-test post-test control design was adopted. A total of 330 men were administered the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT) tool to screen for alcoholics through house to house survey, of which 279 men who scored in the range of 8-15 AUDIT score were considered as alcoholics. Their spouses were selected as study participants (who met the sampling criteria) and subjects were randomly allocated to intervention group (132) and control group (147) through simple randomised sampling. The data was gathered by using WHOQOL-BREF tool to assess the QOL; initially pre-test QOL was assessed, followed by individual health education (45 minutes) and yoga (15 minutes) once a week for 3 consecutive weeks and post-test was done during fourth week for intervention (127) and control groups (142). There were five dropouts in post-test from each group due to health problems, migration and no cooperation from the family for the intervention. Independent t-test was performed by using SPSS version 18.0 to determine effectiveness of health promotion strategies on QOL scores between the intervention and control group and chi-square test was used to find the association between post-intervention QOL scores and selected demographic variable at p<0.05 level of significance. Results: QOL scores in all four domains in the intervention group showed that there was an increase before and after the interventions. On comparing the mean differences between QOL scores post-test in intervention and control group, calculated t-value was (34.04) and the difference was highly statistically significant at p<0.001** showing that health promotional strategies were effective in improving QOL among spouse of alcoholics. There was a significant association between post-test intervention QOL scores of subjects and selected variables such as primary decision maker (p=0.002*) of the family and history of domestic violence (p=0.030*). Conclusion: The study findings suggest that adopting health promotional strategies such as yoga can help the spouses of alcoholics to improve their QOL.