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Children's concepts of illness: implications for health teaching
Insights
Children
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Child Health Concepts
Background:
- Children's understanding of illness evolves through distinct developmental stages.
- Early concepts are global and undifferentiated, progressing to concrete and abstract reasoning.
Purpose of the Study:
- To delineate the developmental trajectory of children's illness concepts.
- To examine shifts in defining illness, identifying illness, and understanding causation with age.
Main Methods:
- Analysis of developmental changes in children's conceptualization of illness.
- Examination of age-related transitions in attributing illness and its causes.
Main Results:
- Children's illness definitions evolve from feeling states to include diagnoses and psychosocial factors.
- Attribution of illness shifts from external cues to internal body signals, and causation from self-actions to external factors.
- School-age children integrate knowledge with distortions in understanding specific illnesses.
Conclusions:
- Children's concepts of illness demonstrate a clear developmental progression.
- Understanding of illness mechanisms becomes more sophisticated, incorporating physiological processes in adolescence.
Abstract:
Children's concepts develop through different stages from global and undifferentiated to concrete and abstract. In the concrete stage perceptual and physical attributes of a concept are dominant. In the abstract stage the essential mental and nonperceptual attributes of a concept are grasped. In general, children's concepts of illness shift with age from definitions based largely on feeling states to broader, more precise definitions that include specific diagnoses and psychosocial indicators of illness. The basis for determining if one is ill also shifts with age from reliance on external cues to reliance on internal body cues. Children's knowledge of specific illnesses increases markedly during the school-age years. It appears that their concepts of specific illnesses are a synthesis of real knowledge and imaginative distortions. Children's concepts of illness causation also develop through different stages from global and undifferentiated to concrete and abstract. School-age children tend to attribute illness causation to their own actions but with age illness is increasingly attributed to external causes. There is in the school-age years increasing differentiation between external and internal in explanations of illness causation with inclusion of means of internalization of the causal agent and intermediary steps between cause and effect. This trend continues in adolescence with description of the illness mechanism in terms of physiologic processes, internal organ, and malfunctions.