International Children’s Illness and Symptom Study
Research type
Research Study
Full title
International Children’s Illness and Symptom Study
IRAS ID
123050
Contact name
Bernie Carter
Contact email
Research summary
Children who have a chronic illness often need on-going and sometimes quite complex treatment although this depends on the nature of their illness. Few studies examine young children’s own qualitative experiences and reports of symptom medication and medical intervention. Studies which consider children’s experiences of chronic illness across different illness experiences, different countries, and within different health care settings are almost non-existent. This study aims to address this deficit by exploring children’s experiences of chronic illness in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
This is a qualitative study using photovoice and conversational interviews with children aged 7-12 years . We plan to recruit 45 children (15 from each country) with a range of different chronic illnesses. Photovoice is an approach that uses photographs taken by the children for the study. Each child will be given a digital camera for a period of about 3 weeks and asked to take photographs that reflect what it is like to live with their chronic illness, the difference it makes to their lives and how they manage their symptoms. We will provide some guidelines to help the children. We will collect the cameras from the children and then print off the photographs before returning these to the children. The photographs will then be used to trigger conversations with the children during an interview about what it is like to grow up with a chronic illness. We will analyse the data thematically from each country before analysing the data across countries. We hope our findings will help health professionals understand more about children’s experiences of chronic illness and symptoms and how we can help them.
REC name
North West - Liverpool Central Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/NW/0447
Date of REC Opinion
3 Jul 2013
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion