Patterns of Health Behaviors and Trajectories of Stress among People with Disabilities in Korea.

Background: As a health vulnerable group, people with disabilities require more health-promoting behavior than non-disabled people. We aimed to identify the types of health behavior of disabled people and to track the trajectories of stress by the type of health behaviors.

Methods: Data came from the Panel Survey of Employment for the Disabled Second Wave by the Employment Development Institute (EDI) in Korea. We used dataset from the first 6 years of the 2nd wave of PSEDSW (2016-2021). The current study analyzed 3,991 subjects. The types of health behavior were identified through latent class analysis (LCA) and the trajectories of stress were estimated through multi-group latent growth modeling using Mplus 8.0.

Results: Two types of groups in health behaviors, smoking-drinking group (SD), nonsmoking-less drinking group (NLSD) were derived. Depending on the types of health behavior, the trajectories of stress appeared significantly different: the NLSD had significantly lower stress than the SD in the first year, and this low-level stress trajectory was maintained continuously for 6 years.

Conclusion: Health behaviors could be suitable as a stress coping method for people with disabilities. This study suggests that it is necessary to make efforts to create an environment that supports people with disabilities to learn healthier ways to cope with stress.