Relationship between acceptance of HIV/AIDS and functional outcomes assessed in a primary care setting

Abstract Acceptance, a third wave cognitive-behavioral concept originally developed for chronic pain patients, was applied to acceptance of chronic illness in an HIV/AIDS population. This study examined the internal reliability of two scales of the chronic illness acceptance questionnaire (CIAQ) called activities engagement (AE), and illness willingness (IW), their relationships with functional outcomes, and their ability to predict functional outcomes after controlling for demographic and medical variables. Sixty-nine HIV-positive persons served as subjects while attending a routine visit at an urban Midwestern US Family Medicine clinic. Mean scores for the AE, IW, and total scales of the CIAQ were slightly higher than pretreatment, but slightly lower than post-treatment scores originally reported for chronic pain patients. Internal reliability values for AE, IW, and total scales of the CIAQ were excellent and consistent with those found in chronic pain acceptance studies. In addition, the AE and IW scal...