Biserni, Chiara (2022) A Closer Look at Post COVID-19 Subjective Fatigue and its relationship with Quality of Life in a Dutch and German Sample. Master thesis, Psychology.
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Abstract
Objective: Fatigue is one of the most common symptoms experienced during previous and current COVID-19 pandemic(s). After delineating a definition of subjective fatigue that applies to the self-report instrument used in the Cognition & COVID-19 study (COCO-19) which is “a subjective lack of mental and/or physical energy that is clearly interfering with normal functioning according to the self and others (Calabresi & Pitteri, 2018) in addition to subjective fatigue defined as a debilitating feeling of both physical and mental tiredness or exhaustion, characterized by lack of energy, concentration and initiative, slowed reactions, sleepiness and finally, muscle weakness (Ortelli, 2021), the present research aims to explore the subjectiveness of fatigue symptoms collected via self-report, analyze their relation to COVID-19 severity and contribution to Quality of Life. Methods: Participants were asked to fill out the COCO-19 test battery (Cognition & COVID-19), a sequence of questionnaires belonging to four domains: neuropsychology, psychology, quality of life and personality. The responses of the two main samples of infected participants (n=147) and healthy controls (n=73) of subjective fatigue as measured by the Fatigue Severity Scale were analyzed in three different ways. To compare the means of the two samples a two-tailed independent sample t-test was used. To measure whether severity of subjective fatigue reflected an increase of severity of experienced illness, a one-way ANOVA and post-hoc analysis was performed. Finally, a multiple regression analysis was performed to explore the impact of subjective fatigue and other constructs that might influence Quality of Life according to research such as sleep quality as measured by the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), Neuroticism measured by the NEO-FFI Neuroticism scale and subjective illness severity. Results: Subjective fatigue was found to be higher amongst participants who were affected by COVID-19 compared to controls. Even participants who had a milder course of disease were found to experience severe subjective fatigue. Subjective fatigue contributes greatly to Quality of Life indices, followed by subjective sleep quality and finally by the subjective severity of COVID-19 infection, as opposed to neuroticism. Conclusion: Subjective fatigue shows an increase in incidence in case of COVID-19 diagnosis, and grows in severity whenever participants subjectively experience more severe COVID-19 symptoms. Furthermore, subjective fatigue shows a great influence on Quality of Life. Practical implications of these findings are discussed in the final sections of this thesis. Keywords: subjective fatigue, COVID-19, Quality of Life
| Item Type: | Thesis (Master) |
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| Supervisor name: | Enriquez Geppert, S. |
| Degree programme: | Psychology |
| Differentiation route: | Clinical Neuropsychology (CN) [Master Psychology] |
| Date Deposited: | 15 Aug 2022 10:01 |
| Last Modified: | 15 Aug 2022 10:01 |
| URI: | http://gmwpublic.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/1284 |
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