The desire to control terminal health care and attitudes toward living wills

Abstract

The desire for control over one's health care is defined as preferring to directly influence the nature of that care. We attempted to measure the following relevant constructs and to examine the relationships among them: (1) desire-for-control (DCON) in a specific health care setting--a hypothetical situation in which a person was facing imminent death; (2) attitude toward an action perceived as enhancing control in that situation--signing a living will; and (3) intention to exercise control by performing that action--actually signing a living will. An analysis of variance (DCON x attitude) of intention to sign a living will yielded statistically significant main effects for DCON and attitude, although DCON was in a direction counter to that predicted. Possible explanations for the DCON finding were explored.