Cognitive Assessment of Causes of a Child’s Disease by Relatives of the Child (based on a study of children with severe chronic and incurable diseases)

Abstract

The article presents the results obtained when testing the hypothesis that the relatives of seriously ill children often feel guilty believing themselves to be responsible for the child’s illness. At the same time, relatives of children with cancer often mystify causes of the disease and relatives of children with other chronic diseases, when assessing causes of the illness, give greater importance to the influence of external impacts, injuries. During the study, a questionnaire was designed to find out basic cognitive mindsets of relatives about the causes of children’s diseases, and using the method of principal components we determined four factors that we have interpreted as the following generalized attitudes toward the causes of disease: “Damage to the body caused by objective factors on the background of their own guilt”, “Fate. Fatalism. Predestination”, “Disease as an accident (trauma)”, and “Illness as an influence of evil forces. Mystic”. As a result of the study, we concluded that the majority of parents of seriously ill children tend to quite realistically consider the child’s disease and claim mainly the environmental negative impact for the cause of the disease, but at the same time they feel to share an essential part of blame for the disease, whatever the nature of illness is. The following differences between parents of children with different diseases were determined: the relatives of children with cancer are less likely to consider a disease as an accident (trauma). Relatives of children in both groups are in the same degree exposed to mystical ideas about the causes of disease.