Types and categories of personal projects: a revelatory means of understanding human occupation.

ABSTRACT

Choice of activity and the way it is described may have little to do with the presence of disease and may or may not align with predetermined conceptual or practice frameworks. The present study examines data previously collected by use of Personal Projects Analysis (PPA) in order to compare the types of projects listed by people with and without multiple sclerosis and to compare the categories of projects selected by both groups to those pre-established in the literature. Secondary analysis tests the differences and similarities in the types of personal projects between two groups, multiple sclerosis (n = 38) and control group (n = 25), matched for demographic characteristics. The analysis compares the categories of personal projects generated by people in both cohorts to pre-established frameworks. No significant difference was found between the types of personal projects chosen by the two cohorts. For 57.2% of participants the self-generated categories matched those from the literature, whereas it diverged for 18.2% of the categories of personal projects generated by participants. The study demonstrates that people with and without multiple sclerosis engage in activities that are similar despite the presence of multiple sclerosis, and that category systems should be used cautiously.