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Causes and Symptoms in Preschoolers' Conceptions of Illness
Author(s) -
Kalish Charles
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01819.x
Subject(s) - categorization , psychology , sociology of health and illness , developmental psychology , concept learning , variety (cybernetics) , natural (archaeology) , cognitive psychology , health care , philosophy , archaeology , epistemology , artificial intelligence , computer science , economics , history , economic growth
The nature of children's concept of illness is of interest both to researchers in health psychology and to those studying naive theories of biology. Recent perspectives on conceptual development suggest that children's concepts are not always simpler versions of adults' concepts. Rather, children's concepts may have a variety of different structures. Two studies investigate whether preschoolers' (and adults') concept of illness has a nominal, cluster, or natural kind representation. Evidence for conceptual structure came from ascriptions of illness and from inferences about properties of illnesses. The roles of symptoms and underlying causes were investigated with respect to these judgments. Results suggest that adults' concept of illness has a property cluster (e.g., prototype) structure. Both causes and symptoms affected adults' categorization of illnesses, with neither type of feature being definitive. Adults did not see any features as universally or uniquely characteristic of illness. Children's ascriptions of illness generally matched adults'. However, children's inferences for some properties were highly correlated with judgments of illness. Thus, children may view illness as a richer source of inferences (and hence more like a natural kind) than do adults. Among the inferences explored were judgments of contagion. Children seemed to associate contagion with a particular type of causal process (infection) rather than with illness per se. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for accounts of children's biological knowledge.