Age Differences in Understandings of Disease Causality: AIDS, Colds, and Cancer

Abstract

The development of concepts of disease causality was explored by asking 9-, 11-, and 13-year-olds and college students about risk factors for AIDS, colds, and cancer. Their knowledge became more accurate and differentiated with age. Although younger children knew a good deal about what causes each of the diseases, they lacked knowledge of what does not cause them, often inferring that risk factors for one disease, especially AIDS, cause other diseases as well. Knowledge of true risk factors for a disease was largely independent of knowledge of non-risk factors, and knowledge of one disease was largely independent of knowledge of another. These findings provide clues as to how disease understandings evolve with age and suggest that health educators must both understand students' current knowledge structures and explicitly teach students to make important differentiations between risk and non-risk factors for a given disease and between distinct diseases.

Personal narratives about states of suffering and wellbeing: Children's conceptualization in terms of physical and psychological domain

“…While psychological suffering is best signified by accounting why they happened to feel bad emotionally, children revealed lower propensity to give a causal account of physical suffering events in general (Study 2) and of health problems in particular (Study 1). Poor spontaneous ability to reason on the origin of illnesses may be ascribed in part to young children's lesser knowledge (Carey, 1995;Hatano & Inagaki, 1994;Kalish, 1997;Schulz & Gopnik, 2004;Siegal, 1988;Sigelman, Maddock, Epstein, & Carpenter, 1993;Wellman & Gelman, 1992), but it could also be partly due to fewer occasions to discuss them, attributable to low personal involvement in their causes. Although the literature on mother-child talks (Reese & Fivush, 1993;Sales et al, 2003) does not address this issue, it seems plausible to think that a more useful didactic function of family discourse is achieved by discussing negative emotional events and physical accidents involving people's behaviours than by explaining causes of an illness.…”

Patterns of Disclosure and Perceptions of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus in Infected Elementary School—age Children

“…Of these 13 children, 10 (77%) displayed the upper cognitive levels of illness causality as concrete-logical or formal-logical. Conversely, ofthe 22 chil¬ dren who did not experience any functional limitation, 16 (73%) either did not identify any illness causality" or gave prelogical explanations,5 a result showing that children with¬ out physical limitation demonstrate a less sophisticated level of understanding ofillness causality than children with limi¬ tations. In addition, the association between understand¬ ing illness causality and functional limitations was not con¬ founded by age because the relation was observed in chil¬ dren aged 7 years and younger and in children older than 7 years.…”

“…The following answers, "I got sick drinking cold milk," "by eating candies," "by scratching myself," or "when I was in bed, my sister was in the dining room and my sickness came straight forwards," evidence phenomenism. In total, 16 children gave no answer or phenomenistic explanations.…”

The Impact of Experience on Children’s Understanding of ADHD

“…[27][28][29]32,36 The interviewer read a vignette for each condition (Appendix A) accompanied by a line drawing of a child showing salient symptoms (e.g., a child jumping up from his desk). Then the interviewer asked a series of standardized questions to encourage the child to respond at his/her highest level of conceptual understanding.…”

“…Scoring criteria for this question have been utilized in past research 32 and were adapted from standardized cognitive-developmental systems designed to assess children's reasoning about illness. [27][28][29]36 Over the past 20 years, several variants of this coding system have yielded consistent findings across a wide range of conditions including AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and asthma. [27][28][29]32 Lower scores in the system represent tautological reasoning or an understanding of medicine in terms of concrete effects, and higher scores represent an ability to articulate mechanisms explaining the interaction between the medication and the body ( Table 2).…”