• Journal of Korean Academy of Nursing
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• v.28 no.4
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• pp.1003-1012
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• 1998

The purpose of this research was to identify the effect of human potential seminars on the perceived stigma of adults with epilepsy. The research employed a quasi experimental design and unequivalent control group pre-post design. The test was conducted on 15 adults with epilepsy attending one psychiartric out-patient clinic in Masan City, Korea. The stigma questionnaire was used as a pre-test to these patients. HPS was done ten times for five weeks from May 6, to July 26, 1996. The stigma questionnaire was again given, but this time as a post test. The control group of 14 adults with epilepsy were receiving medication at the same clinic. The human potential seminars were structured by McHolland(1972) and translated by Lee, Hae Seung(1990). The stigma research tool was modified and revised to be appropriate to Korean culture. It consisted of 15 sentences. The internal consistency was 0.92 with Cronbach's α. Research results are as follows. 1) To determine the homogenity of the experimental and control groups, the pre-stigma results were used and democratic-sociologic characteristics, job characteristics and disease related variables were compared. There was no significant difference between the two groups. 2) To identify the relationship between stigma and patient characteristics a pre-test was done. The study used both Mann-Whitney U-test and ANOVA test for statistical analysis. The variables related to stigma were the reason of unemployment and age at onset of epilepsy. 3) The test results of the effect of the human potential seminars on stigma in the patients with epilepsy, showed that stigma in the experimental group was lower than in the control group. The statistical method used to determine the difference between pre and post stigma results was the Wilcoxon signed rank test. The test results were statistically significant at the one percent level. 4) As a follow-up evaluation ten more patients(66.7% of the total) were additionally tested. In order to investigate if the stigmas were different between the pre, post and follow-up, Repeated measure ANOVA was used. The test results showed that the stigma scores were statistically different between the three groups at the one percent level(F=10.06, d.f.=2, p=0.00).