This study aimed to investigate children's thinking about mental illness by employing a well-established framework of adult illness understanding.
The study adopted a semistructured interview technique and a card selection task to assess children's responses to causes, consequences, timeline and curability of the different types of mental illness. The children were aged between 5 and 11 years.
Results indicated a developmental trend in the children's thinking about mental illness; there was an increase in the children's understanding of the causes, consequences, curability and timeline of mental illness with age. The older children demonstrated a more sophisticated and accurate thinking about mental illness compared with the younger children, who tended to rely on a medical model in order to comprehend novel mental illnesses. Furthermore, the girls exhibited more compassion, showing greater social acceptance compared with the boys.
The Leventhal model provides a useful framework within which to investigate children's knowledge and understanding of mental illness. Limitations of the study and implications for future research are discussed.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 3. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 22 August 2019.
All research outputs
#7,892,077
of 23,924,386 outputs
Outputs from Child: Care, Health & Development
#575
of 1,493 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#25,823
of 72,224 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Child: Care, Health & Development
#8
of 18 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 23,924,386 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 44th percentile – i.e., 44% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,493 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 6.6. This one is in the 45th percentile – i.e., 45% of its peers scored the same or lower than it.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 72,224 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one is in the 17th percentile – i.e., 17% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
We're also able to compare this research output to 18 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one is in the 16th percentile – i.e., 16% of its contemporaries scored the same or lower than it.
