The impact of coping patterns and chronic health conditions on health-related quality of life among children and adolescents

Conclusions: The findings highlight the power of the concept of coping patterns as opposed to coping strategies to explain HRQOL of children and adolescents with chronic disease. Both types of disease (categorical approach) and coping patterns (non-categorical approach) are relevant to predicting HRQOL.What is Known:• The literature on coping has widely documented the existence of individual (unique) coping strategies.• Coping strategies are considered “useful” or “non-useful,” based on whether they increase or decrease negative outcomes caused by certain stressors, such as chronic illness.What is New:• Our findings suggest that youngsters can use “non-useful” strategies to reduce stress caused by chronic illness, while still maintaining higher quality of life, as long as they also apply certain “useful” strategies.• The use of certain combinations of coping strategies, rather than single strategies, is more important to our understanding of how coping affects HRQOL of children with chronic disease.
Source: European Journal of Pediatrics - Category: Pediatrics Source Type: research