Associations between Child Gender, Severity of Illness, Social Support, and Self-management of Vietnamese School-age Children with Asthma

Abstract

Objective: To examine self-management and determine associationsbetween child gender, severity of illness, social support and selfmanagementof Vietnamese school-age children with asthma. Method: Adescriptive predictive cross-sectional design was used. Sample included 76Vietnamese school-age children who came to the outpatient department ofthe NinhThuan general hospital, Viet Nam to follow up asthma treatment.Data were collected from December 2014 to February 2015. Researchinstruments included 1-demographic questionnaire, 2-the asthma selfmanagementinventory for children, 3-the severity of illness scale forasthma, and 4-the social support questionnaire for children. Cronbach’salphas for internal consistency reliability of questionnaires 2 - 4 were 0.83,0.81, and 0.90, respectively. Data were analyzed by using the descriptivestatistics and stepwise multiple regression analysis. Results: Mean totalscore of self-management was 47.55 (S.D. = 5.76), which was at amoderate approaching to high level. Child gender (boys) was the bestpredictor accounting for 27.5% in the prediction of self-management (β =-0.506, P < 0.001), followed by severity of illness (β = -0.374, P < 0.001)and social support (β = 0.201, P < 0.05) accounting for 15.5% and 4.0%,respectively. The 3 significant predictors accounted for 47.0% of variance inasthma self-management (F3,72 = 21.241, P < 0.001). Conclusions: Nursesand health care providers in relation to children with asthma could increaseself-management of children with asthma through promote and strengthensocial support, especially for boys and less illness severity.Keywords: self-management, social support, asthma, school-age children,Viet Nam