PURPOSE
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of health promotion program on physiological stress, perceived stress and menopausal symptoms in menopausal women.
METHODS
This study followed a nonequivalent control group pretest-post test design. The subjects consisted of 57 middle-aged women(30 in the experimental group and 27 in the control group) who were recruited from the community health center in J city. The subjects in the experimental group participated in a health promotion program for 8 weeks, which was composed of yoga and teaching for 1 session per week.
RESULTS
The health promotion program showed a statistical difference in blood pressure, pulse rate and perceived stress. However, there was not a statistical difference in serum cortisol, or menopausal symptoms.
CONCLUSION
This health promotion program was partially effective for reducing stress and it was not effective for reducing menopausal symptoms in menopausal women. It is necessary to conduct a future study using a different time period, measurement time, and target population.

The purpose of this study was to understand the nature and structure of "uncertainty of chronically ill patients" by explaining it more scientifically. This study is based on the unique experiences, which individual uncertainty experiences differ from others. In this sense, Q-methodology which includes self-psychology and abductive logics is applied to the study. The results indicate that there are six types of uncertainty of chronically ill patients : my own fault, self-esteem loss, self-care determination, cure-doubt, reality-restructure, and past-tenacity reality-absence. Thus,"uncertainty of chronically ill patients"is defined from the study as the process in which continuous transition and evaluation of possibility cause changes in human recognition, attitude, action, etc.. The significance of the study is threefold : (1) discovery of six types of uncertainty of chronically ill patients in Korean people, (2) the better understanding of "uncertainty of chronically ill patients", (3) possible developments of nursing concept and assessment and intervention technique based on the new dimension of the understanding in uncertainty for nursing of chronically ill patients from this research.

This study has been conducted to identify and describe conceptual systems of uncertainty using qualitative data from a written association test with open ended questions of "Please list three items in order, as they occur to you, when you think about uncertainty". Two open ended questions were added to help the grouping process of the concepts to be more reliable. 336 listed words were collected from 53 non-patients(nurse, professionals, nurse-students, students) and 65 patients. And data analysis involved three levels of increasing complexity and abstractedness, which involved a grouping process of "concept" with "meaning and value" to encompass a more abstract grouping with greater scope. The initial level grouping of the 336 listed words yielded 28 distinct categories: change, time, life, health and illness, relationships, family and person, event, trenscendental being, luck, hope and expection, positive emotion, negative emotion, action, self, nature, information, society, success and failure, non-predictiveness, anxiety, conflict, powerlessness, vagueness certainty not known, undoubtful, incorrectness, undetermined, indefinite. In the 2nd level of abstraction with 28 distinct categories, change/ time/ life/ health and illness/ relationships/ family and person/ event/ trenscendental being classified under the category of objectivity of uncertainty. Self under the category of subjectivity of uncertainty. Luck/ hope and expection/ positive emotion/ negative emotion/ and action were categorized under the category of consequences, and nature under the category of natural environment. Information/ society/ success went into the category of social environment. Unpredictability/ anxiety/ conflict/ powerlessness/ vagueness/ certainty not known/ undoubtful/ incorrectness/ undetermined/ indefinite were classified into the category of concomittent. And finally, the 3rd level of abstraction, with 7 categories, yielded 3 categories of person/ environment/concomittent. The results are significant to refine the concept of uncertainty. These understanding will facilitate the development effective methods of nursing to the uncertainty in chronic illness.

No abstract available.