Causal attributions of patients with inflammatory bowel diseases

Background: Knowledge of the causal attributions of patients is particularly important in diseases, such as inflammatory, bowel diseases (IBD), with an unclear etiology, a chronic course, and a treatment regimen accompanied by detrimental side effects. Objective: A standardized questionnaire for economically assessing causal attributions concerning IBD was developed and validated. Method: Factor analyses of data from 106 out-patients with IBD yielded,five scales: "dysfunctional stress regulation" (4 items), "social interaction" (3), "life style" (4), "physiology" (3), and "fatalism" (2). Results: Reliability was satisfactory; however, the high retest reliability after an average of 33 months contrasts. with earlier findings. A multi-trait multi-method analysis revealed good construct validity; nonetheless, the causal attributions were not correlated with established indices of disease activity (CDAI, CAI). Conclusions: The utility of the questionnaire is limited-concerning the fatalism-scale.