Background: Occupational therapists need to know about people's beliefs about personal responsibility for health to help them pursue everyday activities.
Aim: The study aims to employ state-of-the-art quantitative approaches to understand people's views of health and responsibility at different ages.
Methods: A mixed method approach was adopted, using text mining to extract information from 233 interviews with participants aged 5 to 96 years, and then exploratory graph analysis to estimate the number of latent variables. The fit of the structure estimated via the exploratory graph analysis was verified using confirmatory factor analysis.
Results: Exploratory graph analysis estimated three dimensions of health responsibility: (1) creating good health habits and feeling good; (2) thinking about one's own health and wanting to improve it; and 3) adopting explicitly normative attitudes to take care of one's health. The comparison between the three dimensions among age groups showed, in general, that children and adolescents, as well as the old elderly (>73 years old) expressed ideas about personal responsibility for health less than young adults, adults and young elderly.
Conclusions: Occupational therapists' knowledge of the concepts of health responsibility is of value when working with a patient's health, but an identified challenge is how to engage children and older persons.
Keywords: Responsibility for health; exploratory graph analysis; health; occupational therapy; text mining.