Choolaei, Abdolreza; (2001) Childhood chronic illness and later-life achievements. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Many studies show chronic illness to be a risk to the child's mental, physical, and social development. They suggest that this may be because of absence from school, isolation from social interaction, and development of a poor self-image. Most findings suggest processes of accumulation of risk from several sources as the child develops. This thesis examines those hypothesised sources and processes of risk. Most earlier research has had information on only some parts of the hypothesised processes, and undertaken analyses using case and control methods. This current work has the advantage of data collected frequently from birth to age 43 years in a large (N=5362 at entry) nationally representative longitudinal study. That avoids some of the problems associated with other designs, for example data collection carried out over a short period in childhood or adult life, with consequent high dependence on recollected information, as well as restricted opportunities for the selection of controls.Information from that study has been used to describe the family circumstances of children with chronic illness, and to examine the effects of such illness on social and psychological development and educational attainment in childhood and adolescence, and on occupation, socio-economic circumstances and the risk of depression and disability in adult life. Findings compare pathways from childhood to adulthood of those who had chronic illness with the pathways of those who did not. They show the development of risk of adverse adult outcomes, and gender differentiation in the development of adult risk that increased with age. Factors that offered protection from risk development and from adult adverse outcomes have also been identified in family and school circumstances and in the attitudes of others in these domains, as well as in the societal context of the period. It is concluded that adverse outcomes of childhood chronic illness are not inevitable.

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