A Culturally Sensitive Health Care Practice Model — Theory Construction and Its Testing

Abstract

The major purpose of this paper was to develop a model for the use of complementary and alternative health care options. Chinese-American families were selected due to their large proportion among all ethnic populations in the United States. Andersen's (1973 and 1995) perception of predisposing and enabling was adopted to test study variables singly and interactively on their health care use. The dependent variable was defined as health behavior preference towards Chinese treatment (also known as complementary and alternative medicine treatment) or Western treatment, and a combination of Chinese and Western treatment (also known as integrative medicine treatment). Data were randomly collected from 240 adult Chinese-American respondents out of 1080 members of the Chinese American Association in the greater Cleveland area. Findings both in the full and partial research models reveal that the factors contributing the most to their medical preferences were their acculturation level and health beliefs. Inter-generational differences in health care use were also discussed.