Information for Children

You may have taken part in this research which is looking at how health affects children´s lives. There were several parts to the research. Have a look below to see the results of the parts you were involved in. A huge thank you to all of you who took part - you all played a very important part in this large research project for The University of Sheffield.

Interviews in school (Hunters Bar Junior School and Firs Hill Community Primary School)

Lots of you spoke to me about your health and health problems. Some of you had things like asthma, tummy aches, eczema, allergies and pneumonia as well as lots of other different health problems.

These are the things which you said your health affects in your life:

Y3 and Y4 Children

Feeling worried or scared
Feeling sad or upset or unhappy
Feeling annoyed or frustrated
Hurt or pain
Your school work
Your daily routine, including things like getting dressed, having a bath, eating your meals
Feeling tired or weak or drowsy
Joining in activities that you want to
Sleep
Feeling jealous

Y5 and Y6 Children

Feeling worried or sad
Feeling upset or unhappy or miserable
Feeling annoyed or frustrated or angry
Hurt or pain
Your learning at school
Your daily routine
Feeling tired or weak or not having energy or feeling weary
Joining in activities that you want to
Sleep
Feeling embarrassed

As you can see, there are lots of things in common for both year groups.

Producing a questionnaire

The next stage was to take all the things you described above and turn them into a questionnaire, using your wordings. Some of you worked with me to produce scales for each question in the questionnaire, putting cards in order of how bad you thought they were. For example, for the question about feeling worried you decided this should be the order of the scale:

I don´t feel worried
I feel a little bit worried
I feel a bit worried
I feel quite worried
I feel very worried
I feel really worried

And for the question about your daily routine, you decided this should be the order:

I have no problems with my daily routine
I have a few problems with my daily routine
I have some problems with my daily routine
I have many problems with my daily routine
I can´t do my daily routine

After doing this for all the different ways in which your health affects you, we produced a questionnaire with 18 questions, including one question at the end about your general health.

Testing out the questionnaire in schools

150 of you tested out this questionnaire with me in schools. Here are some results:

On average, it took 3.8 minutes to complete the questionnaire.
You answered nearly all the questions and out of 150 of you, only 2 people didn’t put an answer for 1 question and 1 person didn’t put an answer for 10 questions.
96% of you were able to fill in the questionnaire by yourselves.
Some of you had difficulty with the meaning of the words weak, affected, frustrated and jealous.

Testing out the final questionnaire in hospital

95 of you tested out this questionnaire with me while you were in hospital. You may have seen me while staying in hospital in S1, S3, M2 or on the Day Care Ward. Here are some results:

On average, it took 5.27 minutes to complete the questionnaire.
You answered nearly all of the questions and out of 97 of you, only 3 people didn’t put an answer for 1 question.
85.4% of you were able to fill in the questionnaire by yourselves.
Some of you had difficulty with the meaning of the words weak, affected, frustrated, embarrassed and jealous.

Lots of you from both school and the hospital made some very helpful suggestions about how the questionnaire could be improved and you also told me which wordings you preferred for the questions. I have taken all these results and your ideas and you can see the final questionnaire using the link in the downloads box on the top right of this page, which is now going to be used by lots of different researchers around England, Australia, Canada and maybe other places too. They are going to use it to measure differences and changes in how children are when they are not very well. We know that the final questionnaire contains things relevant to children as it was developed by you!