More than any other illness, asthma necessitates an on-going partnership between health care provider, patient, and family for optimal treatment to take place. In order for this partnership to work, patients/families and health care providers need to have a common understanding of the nature of asthma, its symptoms, treatment goals, medications, and self-management practices. Morbidity outcomes reported in the literature and data from our current studies suggest that this is not the case, and that patients and health care professionals think about asthma in quite different ways. The broad objective of the study Parental Illness Representations and Asthma Management is to explore the nature of the discrepancies between the parental and professional model of asthma as well as antecedents and outcomes related to these illness representations. Specifically the study is designed to: 1) Describe the illness representation of parents of children with asthma; 2) Describe the child's symptom experience; 3) Identify the discrepancies between the """"""""professional model"""""""" of asthma and the """"""""patient/family model""""""""; 4) Determine the impact of demographic and other background characteristics on the parental illness representation, the child's symptom experience, and the parent/health care provider relationship, and desired outcomes; 5) Evaluate the unique contributions of the parental illness representation, the child's symptom experience, and the parent/provider relationship to appropriate health care seeking and adequacy of the medication regimen. The study utilizes a cross-sectional design and will enroll 215 children with asthma (ages 5-12 years of age) of diverse sociodemographic backgrounds from an urban clinic and a community pediatric practice. A semi-structured interview will gather information about the child's illness severity, medications used, and health care contacts. The interview will also assess the parental illness representation in the domains of the nature (identity) of the disease and its symptoms, cause expected outcomes and the role of medications Data analysis will include a description of the parental illness representation visa vie the professional model; a description of the child's symptom experience, subgroup comparisons (based on background characteristics of the illness representation, health care seeking, and adequacy of the medication regimen; and modeling to evaluate the unique role of the illness representation in predicting asthma management outcomes. ? ? ?
