Personality and Consultations with Complementary and Alternative Medicine Practitioners: A Five-Factor Model Investigation of the Degree of Use and Motives
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: As interest in and use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) providers continues to grow, it is important to understand which characteristics incline people to experiment with and become frequent consumers of CAM practitioners. The purpose of this study was to examine how personality, as assessed by the five-factor model, was related to the breadth, frequency, and types of provider-based CAM use. Relationships between the personality factors (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) and motives for consulting CAM providers were also explored. METHODS: A convenience sample of 184 current CAM clients recruited through the offices of 12 conventional medicine and 17 CAM practitioners completed a survey package including measures of health status, CAM use, personality, and motivations for using CAM. RESULTS: Only Openness and Agreeableness were consistently linked to different dimensions of CAM use, with each associated with consultations with CAM practitioners, and homeopaths and naturopaths in particular. After controlling for sociodemographic and health status variables in the stepwise multiple regressions, Openness was associated with the variety of CAM providers tried, whereas Agreeableness was linked to both the breadth and frequency of CAM consultations. Holistic and proactive health motivations were associated with both personality factors, and Agreeableness was also associated with motives reflecting a desire for shared decision-making. CONCLUSIONS: Findings indicate that individuals who are open and agreeable, as described by the five-factor model of personality, consult CAM practitioners to a greater extent. The motives involved suggest a congruency between CAM and their own perspectives regarding health and patient-provider interactions, which may have implications for understanding treatment adherence and outcomes.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".