Asthma Knowledge, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Management Among Rural Adolescents with Poorly Controlled Asthma.
Sarah I Leonard, Eleanor R Turi, Amarilis Céspedes and 3 others
PMID 35880266WHAT IT FOUND
39% of rural adolescents with poorly controlled asthma thought daily medications are addictive.
Confidence partly linked knowledge to prevention, but not acute symptom care. School nurses may need to assess confidence and teach prevention.
Key findings
01Mean asthma knowledge was 76.4% correct, but only 27% understood asthma is chronic and 39% thought daily medications were addictive.
02Asthma confidence partly explained the link between knowledge and symptom prevention, but not the link between knowledge and acute symptom management.
03Male adolescents had less knowledge, took fewer prevention steps, and had lower confidence than female adolescents; White adolescents took 36% fewer prevention steps than Black adolescents.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study is cross-sectional, so it cannot show that knowledge or confidence causes better self-management. It used baseline data from a larger trial and did not test an intervention. All measures were self-report and could be affected by recall bias. The asthma knowledge and acute management scales had low internal consistency in this sample (Cronbach's alpha 0.41 for both), so those constructs may not have been measured well. The associations were statistically significant but small, so other unmeasured factors likely matter. The sample was rural South Carolina adolescents with poorly controlled asthma, so the findings may not apply to suburban or urban adolescents. No comparison group with well-controlled asthma was included.
Declared interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that improving asthma knowledge or confidence will improve asthma control. The study is cross-sectional, did not test an intervention, and confidence was not linked to acute symptom management.