QUALITY-OF-LIFE IN CHILDREN WITH CHRONIC ILLNESS - LITERATURE-REVIEW AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

Most studies of the literature concerning the quality of life of children with chronic illness have been conducted in the somatic field, using objective criteria. However the concept of quality of life has evolved: while the first studies took into consideration the effects of somatic diseases on children or on their families, the recent studies tend to focus on the coping strategies developped by the families. The author.5 emphazise two main points concerning the evaluation and the concept of quality of life: 1) the measures of the quality of life should be ''dynamic''. i.e. they should deal with the developmental changes of the child: 2) due to the difficulty to clearly define the concept and to the variability of the available informations, a ''convergence '' notion should be preferably used: i.e. information should be collected from several sources (professionnals. families and children) and should concern most domains of the child's life: school, health, games, relationnal life.