Pediatric asthma is estimated to be responsible for approximately 20% of all hospitalizations of children under the age of 15, and is the primary cause of school absenteeism. The financial and personal hardship represented by childhood asthma attests to the importance of understanding the precise effects of those programs designed to manage this pressing concern. The long-term goal of this proposed research is to provide a precise and accurate integration of the available evidence on self- management training programs for children with asthma. In an effort to establish the technical merit and feasibility of this approach, Phase I will conduct a meta-analytic statistical integration of the evidence in a delimited segment of this research domain. It is projected that during Phase II of this project, the effort will be expanded to include the remaining outcome measures and types of programs not examined in Phase I. The Phase II report will summarize and integrate all of the available evidence on self-management training programs for children with asthma. These results will allow us to distill the available evidence into a template for the design of the most effective self-management training programs for asthmatic children. Phase III effort would in turn be devoted to the actual implementation, testing, and refinement of that training program specified by the results of Phase II.
