VALIDITY OF SELECTED PREDICTORS FOR SUCCESSFULWEARING OF CONTACT LENSES

Abstract

For a time there was quite an interest in personality and wearing contact lenses. Sandry and Rosenwasser (1966) used the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire to measure the source traits of 79 neophyte contact lens wearers and found six significant factors. From their descriptions of the personalities of the successful or the unsuccessful wearers several concepts such as anxiety, motivation, and symptoms emerged in predicting wearing and may suggest further study. Specifically, motivation has been a concern of contact lens fitters for a long time. It is said that one can learn a great deal about a patient's chances of successful lens wearing by aslung why he is interested in wearing contact lenses (Cavanagh & Enoch, 1989-1991), which implies some relation between wearing and motivation. The present research was done to investigate the relationship between contact lens wearing and anxiety, motivation, and persistent symptoms at the end of a two-week adapting period. Data from 23 consecutive neophyte contact lens wearers, 15 men and eight women, ages 16 to 36 years, were analyzed with respect to successful or unsuccessful wearing of contact lenses, assessed after a trial period of about two weeks using lour measures. Anxiety was assessed by the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale during the history-taking period. Motivation, divided into qualitative and quantitative measures, was assessed by asking the wearers their reasons for seeking contact lenses and the number of weeks of earnings which they were willing to spend on contact lenses, respectively. The traditional hard contact lenses, made from polymethyl methacrylate material, were then fitted to these wearers. Any symptoms persistent at the end of two weeks despite attempts to remove these symptoms were noted. The M~M-Whitney U tests of the difference between the 19 successful and the four unsuccessful wearers on the four factors were performed. Sex differences were not analyzed because there were too few women. Four wearers were unsuccessful, i.e., they discarded the lenses or wore lenses only occasionally after the adapting period, but 19 successful persons wore them all the time. The MannWhitney U values between these two groups of wearers were for anxiety 33.5 (ns), motivationqualitative 30.0 (ns), motivation-quantitative 34.0 (ns), and persistent symptoms 0.0 (p<.002), indicating that only persistent symptoms, such as lid involvement and sensitivity of the eye to the wearing, predicted wearing well.