Patterns of Self-Definition of Asthma Patients and Normal Persons in the Freiburg Personality Inventory

Abstract

The concept of the specificity of psychosomatic diseases (Alexander) is being differentiated at the time. In order to clarify some aspects of this problem, we want to investigate whether types of self-rating of normal persons differ from those of patients with bronchial asthma. In a second step we shall examine whether those types of self-rating can be found also in expert rating and third the differences between the two groups concerning their help-seeking behavior. For the purpose of this investigation the data of 135 patients with bronchial asthma (who had been investigated at the Heidelberg University Medical Department between 1979 and 1982) and of 330 persons of the Mannheim Cohort Study (who are a representative sample of the average urban population) have been reanalyzed. By means of the Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI) data cluster analyses have been done. Evaluated by a group of 5 (5-cluster solution) the patterns of self-rating of patients with bronchial asthma do not differ significantly from those of normal persons. They had a high correlation to the expert rating and to other social-medically important outer criteria. The results indicate that the specificity of psychosomatic patients in relation to normal persons is not very convincing in a pattern of self-rating on the level of the FPI. Therefore, further research in this field seems to be necessary.