[An integrated approach to the psychological features of the asthmatic child]

Abstract

The work starts from the interrelation that occurs in asthmatic children between physical and psychical aspects. We carry out the experiment on an instructional programme as an efficient method of intervention that on one hand improves the levels of personal, social school and family adaptation and that on the other hand helps to modify the wrong attitudes about the illness, presuming that, in some way, it will be a relief in the physical aspect of the illness. The sample chosen by randomization and stratification from the Allergy Service of the Insular Hospital of Gran Canaria was tested using an experimental and control-placebo with retest design. The children were between nine and eleven years old. The results for the adaptative aspects of the subjects were similar to the ones that Doctors Hernández and Hernández from La Laguna University (Canarias) got through similar studies, though the outcomes were not as successful as we hoped in cognitive/affective and social restriction. About the modification of the more internal aspects of asthmatic problems the programme was successful though we didn't modify some attitudes. We had the improvements that we hoped in some physical aspects as secondary effects but it seems that the programme can have more influence among them.