Considering APQ control dimensions results showed that control positive and control negative were inversely associated with emotional representations, timeline, chronic, timeline cyclical, consequences negative, and identity.
The Illness Perception Questionnaire-revised (IPQ-R) assesses the following illness perceptions- identity, chronic timeline, cyclical timeline, treatment control, personal control, coherence, causes and emotion reaction.
It has 32 items distributed on 7 dimensions: timeline chronic and cyclical, positive and negative consequences, positive and negative control and e motional representations.
The APQ consists of 32 items, comprising seven (sub scales, i.e., timeline chronic, timeline cyclical, consequence positive, consequence negative, emotional representations, control positive, and control negative (see Table 1 for the list of items).
Both chronic and cyclical timelines were associated with more negative emotional responses to aging, lower levels of perceived control over experiences relating to aging, more negative aging consequences, and higher aging identity scores.
As can be expected, older age was significantly correlated with a more chronic and cyclical perception of, attributing more negative consequences to, and harboring more negative emotions towards aging (see Table 5).
Based on the article by Barker and colleagues [ 8], a 7-factor measurement model was specified with the 32 indicators loading onto their corresponding latent dimensions, i.e., timeline chronic, timeline cyclical, consequence positive, consequence negative, control positive, control negative, and emotional representations.
The APQ assesses self-perceptions of aging along eight distinct domains or subscales; seven of these examine views about own aging, these are: timeline chronic, timeline cyclical, consequences positive, consequences negative, control positive, control negative, and emotional representations; the eighth domain is the identity domain and this examines the experience of health-related changes.
In our sample, the timeline was necessarily chronic (and often cyclical), as we selected patients identifying with CLD and not necessarily having a history of acute Lyme disease.
Intra-class correlation coefficients were 0.78 (timeline chronic), 0.79 (timeline cyclical), 0.70 (consequences positive), 0.83 (consequences negative), 0.83 (emotional representations), 0.76 (control positive), 0.61 (control negative), and 0.75 (identity).
