Self, self-care and self-management concepts: implications for self-management education

Principles imply fundamental truths upon which rest knowledge, learning, and teaching. Knowledge and principles are memorialized by and disseminated through words. The denotative word meanings must be agreed upon in order that principles and knowledge can be formally written and spoken so that, the structure of scientific information can be built. The terms selfconcept, self-care, self-management are significant in that they are foundational stones in the structure of self-management education. To illustrate some of the confusion related to them, randomly selected definitions from literature are presented for the sake of delineation. The purpose of this paper is to examine the concepts: self, self-care and self-management; an attempt to reach a better understanding of the interplay between these concepts in the selfmanagement education process.