Abstract
The research of children´s conception of illness is not frequent in the world, and in the Czech Republic it is an absolute rarity. This empiric study summarizes current views on children´s conceptions of health and disease.
It draws attention to the specific features of the child as a patient (specifics of development, personality, social role). The study describes the CIPQ questionnaire (Walker et al., 2006) which identifies children´s conception of illness.
The study describes the pilot testing of the Czech version of the CIPQ in a sample of 40 children aged 5–18 years (20 boys, 20 girls). In the category of chronic diseases, more favourable overall score was assessed in girls, whereas boys came off better in scores of acute forms of disease.