Concepts of Health and Illness in Egyptian Children

Background: Concepts of health and illness give additional important information to the biomedical models. According to the literature of lay beliefs, these concepts significantly affect population's health and illness behaviors and their health consciousness. Detecting children's lay concepts of health means a special professional challenge since they are not able to think in an abstract and systematic way yet, particularly to express this verbally. The draw-and-write method, which is based on projective technique, enables us to map children's lay concepts of health in 9-11 years of age. Objective: The main goal of the present study is to detect 9-11 year-old children's lay concepts of health, illness and risks, by using a technique, which has already been accepted and applied, at international level to inform future health promotion work. Subjects and Methods: The study was conducted among 4th , 5th grade schoolchildren 9-11 years in two primary schools in Gizza. The sample consisted of 472 students (53% males and 47% female). We used the "draw and write" technique to detect children's lay beliefs and knowledge of health and illness asking them about sources of information. Results: Most children apply a mixture of the biomedical and holistic health definitions. Many of them also emphasize the role of healthy lifestyle. Television and the media were the most important sources of information of health and illness followed by their parents and physicians. Conclusion: These findings support earlier findings from international literature that 9-11 year-old children have a significant base of knowledge about health, illness and diseaseinducing risks.