Disability and functionality

I have been working on finishing up this report about using multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses to analyze a dataset about disability and functionality.

Finally, the draft is done... (hope the cleaning up won't take too much longer)... the day I broke my USB drive... leaving it in a state of, sort of, broken but still, sort of, functional...

So is the life's story...

Give and take... I guess... 8-O lol

BTW, what did I learn from this project?

First, the experts defined functionality and disability using the following 16 measures with the first 6 of them classified as Activities of daily living and the remaining 10 as Instrumental activities of daily living.

Second, based on the dataset I had, I ran some analyses trying to see whether I could recreated the two factor model for these 16 items... Yet, what I came up with was much different from how they had things classified.

So I decided to answer these questions based on my recalls of the past... with 0 indicating healthy and 1 indicating disabled...

Activities of daily living

1. 0.00 (Y1) eating: At the beginning when things was worst, I could eat as long as the weight of food plus the bowl was not heavier than I could handle.
2. 0.00 (Y2) getting in/out of bed: The first few days were really bad. It took quite a bit of work to either get out of the bed or to lay down. Yet, I had never been unable to get in or out of the bed... regardless the speed or the amount of effort..
3. 0.00 (Y3) getting around inside: Thank God that the floor in my room is flat.... Yet, when I went to the federal building, I could barely move my feet because the floor... was not flat... At the beginging, it was bad... I basically was able to walk from my bed to the bathroom... and that marked all the exercise I did for the day....
4. 0.00 (Y4) dressing: It took me longer time to get dressed because of the pains all over. However, I was able to dress and undress myself.
5. 0.00 (Y5) bathing: Something I luckily never had problem with... other than needing to be ware of the floor for slippery when wet.

Instrumental activities of daily living

1. 0.00 (Y6) getting to the bathroom: One thing I had no problem doing... other than... slow... slow...
2. 1.00 (Y7) doing heavy house work: Couldn't even carry a bowl of soup from the kitchen to the room... can't carry much weight either at work up to today....
3. 1.00 (Y8) doing light house work: I don't really know what light house work meant... one thing I knew was that I even had problem carrying more than one plate or so from my room to the kitchen at the beginning.
4. 1.00 (Y9) doing laundry: I didn't know doing laundry was difficult until my mama left New York to take care of my sister in Taiwan. It was difficult but I tried.... I never knew that the act of throwing each piece of clothing into the washer in the basement could be so strenuous. I had to take breaks in between the pick up a garment and throw it into the washer activity... or, I had to take many breaks to load my clothes into the washer.
5. 0.00 (Y10) cooking: This question is difficult because I don't really cook... I just put all thing in the pot and bring everything to a boil... Yet, one thing I knew is that... I was in no condition to cook gourmet food either...
6. 1.00 (Y11) grocery shopping: Half a pond of cherries were already too heavy for me to carry. After my mom went back to Taiwan, for a long time, I depended on the nice people I know to help me carry grocery weighting more than 1 pound back to my building, if not my kitchen.
7. 1.00 (Y12) getting about outside: The road has to be flat for me to walk on. My walkability decreased exponentially when the pavement or ground is slanted in the least slight fashion. Even when the condition got better, a lot of times, I might have no problem getting out.... the real problem was to get back.... How many a day... I, one step at a time, tried to make it back....
8. 1.00 (Y13) traveling: Sitting in a car, bus, or subway train kills me because of the worsened nerve pains. (Therefore, forget about long trips in moving vehicles such as in airplane.)
9. 1.00 (Y14) managing money: It did get to the point when it was sort of difficult to manage money when you don't have squat to manage... That's why I put an 1 for this item... although I am not quite sure whether this is why they mean by managing money... 8-O lol oops..
10. 0.00 (Y15) taking medicine: To be honest, I was really good in popping my drugs except for I stopped taking Vicodin a day or two later because of its side effect.
11. 0.00 (Y16) telephoning: I was capable of making phone calls and talking on the phone. However, when the nerve pains were really bad, the same volume sounded louder, ordinary speed seemed too fast, and, both contributing to increased nerve pains and slowering down of cognitive processing speed. Yet, I give it a 0 because, regardless, I was still physically cable in either making or answering telephone calls.

So, what else do I learn about the 16 measures now I have responded to them all...?
Maybe the items I responded "0" to should go together instead because they seem to be easier tasks to perform and I would have to be in a worse condition to be disabled in these items... at least, for me, a half-baked handicapped... (Gott Sei Danke...) (and, of course, this opinion is nothing scientific.... resting on the recolletion of my dasein moments only... 8-X)