Examining the impact of resilience on communicative participation in individuals with Parkinson’s Disease

Abstract

Communicative participation is defined as taking part in life situations where knowledge, information, ideas, and feelings are exchanged. Communicative participation has been shown to be impacted by various psychosocial variables. One construct of interest is resilience, which is the ability to bounce back from a traumatic event or hardship. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of resilience, among other psychosocial factors such as perceived social support, self-efficacy, and depression, on communicative participation in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). As part of a larger study, 38 individuals with PD completed the Communicative Participation Item Bank-General Short Form, the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale, the Patient Health Questionnaire-9, the Communicative Activities Checklist- modified, and the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support. The results revealed that self-efficacy was a significant predictor of communicative participation however, there were no significant results related to resilience as a significant predictor of communicative participation, or that indicated a significant change in resilience either in participants who underwent speech therapy during the course of the study or those who did not. The results of this study suggest that self-efficacy may have more clinical relevance to speech-language pathology treatment and potentially provides insight into the complex psychosocial construct of resilience.