Predicting cardiac patients' quality of life from the characteristics of their spouses.

Recovery from surgery can be facilitated by personal and social resources such as perceived self-efficacy and social support. Moreover, the existence of a social network and the behavior of its members can also have a positive effect. Patients (N = 381; 302 men, 79 women) undergoing heart surgery were surveyed once before and twice after surgery. In addition, 114 social-network members (18 men, 96 women), most of them spouses, reported about their own perceived resources at Time 1. The patient-spouse dyad was chosen as the unit of analysis. It turned out that characteristics of spouses were related to those of patients. Recovery from surgery at Time 2 and readjustment to normal life after half a year (Time 3) could be partly predicted by spouses' perceived self-efficacy and social support as measured at Time 1.