Psychological well-being in individuals living in the community with traumatic brain injury.
Lisa Payne, Lenore Hawley, Jessica M Ketchum and 6 others
PMID 29708442WHAT IT FOUND
People after traumatic brain injury who were not working or volunteering reported low life satisfaction, high distress, and cognitive difficulties.
Several well-being questions tended to agree, so a single question may not show the whole picture.
Key findings
0174 community-living people with TBI who were not employed or volunteering reported low life satisfaction.
02Participants showed cognitive impairment and high emotional distress relative to the normative sample.
03Scores on the Flourishing Scale and the Scale of Positive and Negative Emotion moved with scores on established well-being measures.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The sample was a convenience group recruited for a larger volunteer trial, so it represents people interested in volunteering and not all people with TBI. People with higher life satisfaction were excluded, because the study required a Satisfaction with Life Scale score of 25 or below. Valid effort was found for 80% of participants, and the 20% who may have produced invalid cognitive scores were still included, so cognitive impairment may be overstated. These are baseline descriptive data, not results of the volunteer intervention, so they cannot show that volunteering or any treatment improves well-being. The relationships are between scores collected at baseline, so they cannot show cause. The sample was mostly white and recruited through former patients and local organisations, so it may not represent all community-living people with TBI.
Declared interests
The authors reported no declarations of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat these findings as evidence that volunteering improves psychological well-being. This paper only describes baseline data from people who were interested in a volunteer study, and it did not test the intervention.