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International Journal of Science Education
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Children's Self-documentation and Understanding of the Concepts 'Healthy'
and 'Unhealthy'
Suzanne Reeve
a
; Philip Bell
a
a
University of Washington, Learning Sciences, USA
First Published:September2009
To cite this Article Reeve, Suzanne and Bell, Philip(2009)'Children's Self-documentation and Understanding of the Concepts 'Healthy'
and 'Unhealthy'',International Journal of Science Education,31:14,1953 — 1974
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International Journal of Science Education
Vol. 31, No. 14, 15 September 2009, pp. 1953–1974
ISSN 0950-0693 (print)/ISSN 1464-5289 (online)/09/141953–22
© 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/09500690802311146
RESEARCH REPORT
Children’s Self-documentation and
Understanding of the Concepts
‘Healthy’ and ‘Unhealthy’
Suzanne Reeve* and Philip Bell
University of Washington, Learning Sciences, USA
Taylor and FrancisTSED_A_331281.sgm10.1080/09500690802311146International Journal of Science Education0950-0693 (print)/1464-5289 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis
0000000002008Ms. SuzanneReevesreeve@u.washington.edu
The present paper describes a study in which 13 children aged 9–11 years, of diverse ethnic, linguis-
tic, and socio-economic backgrounds, were asked to use a digital camera and small notebook to
document the range of things they consider to be healthy and unhealthy. Using open-ended inter-
view questions, the children were then asked to explain each item, including what it was, why they
chose it, and why they thought it was either healthy or unhealthy. The range of definitions of
‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ invoked by the children was surprisingly broad, encompassing not only
illness and proper nutrition, but also environmental health, mental health, cleanliness, and other
meanings. Findings across all 13 children are displayed, and a case study of one child serves as a
detailed example of the types of meanings children ascribe to the words ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’,
as well as the kinds of analyses being employed on these data. The theoretical implications of these
results for research on children’s ideas about health, as well as implications for the design of health
interventions, are discussed.
Introduction
Over the past two decades, a multitude of authors have called for the need to take
children’s prior knowledge or ‘preconceptions’ into account in the design and imple-
mentation of instruction (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000). One significant
research agenda in this direction has focused on identifying naive conceptions learn-
ers frequently have, often with the object of replacing these conceptions with correct
or ‘expert’ understandings (e.g., Carey, 1985; diSessa, 2006; Smith, diSessa, &
Roschelle, 1993; Teixeira, 2000). Some researchers, however, have suggested that
the processes of learning and conceptual change are much more complex than simply
recognising false conceptions and replacing them with correct ones. Bell (2002),
*Corresponding author. University of Washington, Learning Sciences, 312 Miller Hall, Box
353600, Seattle, WA 98195-3600, USA. Email: sreeve@u.washington.edu
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1954 S. Reeve and P. Bell
Linn (1995) and Palmer (1999), for example, discuss cases in which multiple concep-
tions exist alongside each other, some scientifically correct and others not. diSessa
complicates the picture further, putting forth a view of conceptual change he charac-
terises as a ‘complex knowledge systems’ or ‘conceptual ecology’ view (2002, p. 31).
From a conceptual ecology perspective, knowledge consists of multiple subparts,
each of varying types and scales. Naïve learners will possess and invoke different
combinations of these subparts in a given context than expert learners, such that the
number of individual subelements and the changing connections between them
defines the process of conceptual change. This frame evokes a definition of knowl-
edge as dynamic in time and space. diSessa’s work provides evidence of this viewpoint
in the domain of physics learning, showing how individual students can simulta-
neously hold different understandings of the same phenomena, as well as use different
everyday principles as justifications for their ideas in context-dependent ways
(diSessa, 1988, 2002). We argue that young people’s reasoning in other content areas
is also compatible with a conceptual ecology perspective, and report here on research
illustrating such reasoning. We focus specifically on complex knowledge systems as
being rooted in specific activities and contexts, showing that young people’s under-
standings can be multifaceted and connected to personally significant ideas.
Personal health, and the accompanying understanding of human biology on which
it depends, is one such area. The popular press reports almost daily on medical find-
ings about diet and lifestyle, emerging diseases, and global health and illness, meaning
that most individuals in our society are exposed to multiple and sometimes conflicting
images of health. In addition, human physiology describes a number of complex and
interacting systems that can be difficult to understand even after focused study
(Michael et al., 1999, 2002). In many cases, making decisions about personal health
also requires interacting with a web of social resources and institutions, including
friends and family, insurance companies, and various kinds of healthcare providers.
The number and complexity of the ideas involved, and the multiplicity of consequen-
tial everyday contexts, make the domain of human health another likely candidate for
testing the validity of the conceptual ecology theory and developing it further.
The area of personal health also carries great social and economic significance, as
the incidence of so-called ‘lifestyle’ conditions, such as obesity and type 2 diabetes,
increases dramatically along with the cost of treating them (Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, 2006; US Department of Health and Human Services,
2001). A recent consensus report in the USA states that 90 million adults in that
country ‘have difficulty understanding and acting upon health information’
(Nielsen-Bohlman, Panzer, & Kindig, 2004, p. 1), and calls for the educational and
healthcare systems, as well as broader societal and cultural institutions, to act to
increase health literacy. With these ideas in view, it becomes vitally important for
researchers to understand how people develop ideas about personal health, espe-
cially during childhood and adolescence, and how they choose when and whether to
act upon them.
In this paper, we use data from a photodocumentation task about personal health
to illustrate the ideas of 13 children aged nine, ten, and eleven years from diverse
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1955
backgrounds. We begin by surveying previous research about children’s understand-
ings of health, review findings of our research, and finally discuss how these findings
support the use of a ‘conceptual ecology’ model, both theoretically and as applied to
curriculum design.
Previous Research on Children’s Ideas about Health
Children’s understandings about health have been investigated from a number of
different theoretical and conceptual perspectives. Some studies conducted by physi-
cians or health researchers investigate understandings of health by examining
concepts of illness or disease (Bibace & Walsh, 1981; Koopman, Baars, Chaplin, &
Zwinderman, 2004; Perrin & Gerrity, 1981; Perrin, Sayer, & Willett, 1991). While
these studies are informative and provide a wealth of information about the develop-
ment of children’s understandings, they (either implicitly or explicitly) treat health
and illness
1
as two opposing constructs, neglecting the possibility that children’s
understanding of health encompasses a broader range of ideas. Some philosophers of
health, however, such as Nordenfelt (2007) and Schramme (2007), claim that health
encompasses not only regular functioning of all bodily organs, but also a subjective
dimension that measures the ability to achieve desired goals. This subjective dimen-
sion may differ based on social and cultural norms. Empirical research by Wetton
and Moon (1988), Wetton and McWhirter (1998), Natapoff (1978), Millstein and
Irwin (1987), and Boruchovitch and Mednick (1997) suggests that children’s under-
standings of health bear out this claim.
Wetton (e.g., MacGregor, Currie, & Wetton, 1998; Wetton & McWhirter, 1998;
Wetton & Moon, 1988) pioneered the use of the ‘draw and write’ technique for
researching children’s ideas of health. This protocol involves presenting children with
a scenario or story, asking them to draw a picture of their ideas about it, and then
writing words or sentences to explain the picture. Wetton and her colleagues have
used this technique to investigate a range of health issues with children aged 4–11
years. For example, in a nationwide study of English, Irish, and Welsh children’s
views about health (Wetton & McWhirter, 1998; Wetton & Moon, 1988), the ‘draw
and write’ technique helped researchers to isolate six main areas of focus for a new
health education curriculum. These areas included topics related to bodily health,
such as ‘how my body works’ and ‘healthy eating,’ but also emotional and commu-
nity health, such as ‘keeping safe’ and ‘relationships.’ The authors wrote:
Above all the children’s words and images revealed the wealth of the children’s knowl-
edge. Sometimes the meaning was non-sense, when conflicting information had been
forced to fit pre-existing constructs with which the children were comfortable. More
usually it matched and went beyond narrow, adult, medical constructions of the meaning
of health. (Wetton & McWhirter, 1998, p. 277)
In a survey of US children’s ideas about the word ‘health’ and what it means to be
healthy, Natapoff (1978) found that, although a significant proportion of children
included the idea ‘not sick’ in their definition of health, even more children
described health as feeling good or being able to do desired activities. Other
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1956 S. Reeve and P. Bell
frequently cited answers were being able to eat regular foods and exercise, and being
clean. Natapoff states of her findings, ‘It became clear … that being healthy and
being sick were two different things’ (1978, p. 998). Research by Boruchovitch and
Mednick (1997) with children attending middle and low socio-economic status
schools in Sao Paulo, Brazil corroborates Natapoff’s results. Boruchovitch and
Mednick conclude that children saw health and illness not as opposite sides of the
same coin, but as ‘distinct though related concepts’ (1997, p. 454).
Despite some important exceptions, there is relatively little published research
portraying the various meanings children associate with health in their own words.
If, as the above-cited studies suggest, children’s understandings of health are really
more complex than has been traditionally assumed, the added depth made possible
by a conceptual ecology frame would aid in constructing a more complete picture.
Envisioning health understandings as a multi-faceted conceptual system, as opposed
to a one-dimensional continuum of health and illness, allows for more breadth and
nuance in framing children’s actual ideas.
The work reported here attempts to fill some of the gaps in previous research on
children’s conceptions of health. We use an open-ended prompt to elicit children’s
understandings of the terms ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’, and allow children to gener-
ate their own set of concrete artefacts with which these two relatively abstract
terms can be discussed. The research questions addressed in this paper are as
follows:
1. What meaning(s) or definition(s) of health do children hold, and in what
settings and activity systems are those meanings encountered?
2. What everyday activities or ideas influence children’s understandings about
health?
3. What are the implications of children’s understanding of health for design of
classroom instruction?
Methods
The work described here is part of an ethnographic study taking place in a city in the
Northwestern USA (see Bell, Bricker, Lee, Reeve, & Zimmerman, 2006). Our team
of researchers has been investigating children’s everyday encounters with science and
technology in one community, across the contexts of the children’s lives. This larger
study focuses on 13 children aged 9–11 years and their families, who were recruited
in fall 2005 and winter 2006 through information distributed at the children’s school.
Observation and/or participant observation by researchers has taken place in the
school, including the classrooms, playground, lunchroom, computer classroom, gym,
music room, and library; in the children’s homes; and in various community locations,
including sporting events, church functions, museums, and camping trips. Fieldwork
to date amounts to approximately 75 hours of data per child. Although the number
of participants in this work is considerably smaller than that of previously cited inter-
view or survey studies, the depth with which we are able to investigate children’s ideas
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1957
and the activity systems or beliefs that underlie them is correspondingly much greater,
given the significant time spent collecting data on each case.
Task Description
The task described in this paper took place in winter and spring 2006, and involved
all 13 children from the ethnographic study. We used autodocumentation techniques
(Clark-Ibanez, 2004), followed by ethnographic interviewing, to elicit children’s
ideas about the concepts ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. During a regularly scheduled
home visit in winter or spring 2006, each child was given a small digital camera, a
spiral notebook, and a printed sheet describing this assignment, which was to ‘take
pictures or write about the range of things you think are healthy or unhealthy’ (see
Appendix for the task assignment). The prompt language was purposely left open-
ended, so children could determine the kinds of items they might consider to be
healthy or unhealthy in any way they chose. In order to protect the privacy of those
not consented into the study, children were requested to take pictures only of objects,
or of people who had given consent for this research, such as themselves or family
members. If children were unable to take pictures of something they wanted to
include in their assignment, they were instructed to write about it in their notebook
or discuss it later with researchers. Children and parents were also asked to review
together the child’s pictures and notebook entries before our next visit, and to delete
any items they did not wish us to see.
On our next home visit, usually within one to two weeks of the task assignment,
we reviewed each child’s pictures and notebook entries with him or her in an ethno-
graphic interview format. Using a laptop computer and projector, we displayed the
photographic images and reviewed any entries the child made in his or her notebook.
For each item, we typically asked the following questions: Tell us what this is. Did
you think this was healthy or unhealthy? Why? Where did/do you normally see this
item/person? Researchers also asked follow-up questions about other items or activi-
ties that were referenced in the conversation (e.g., diet soda consumption in relation
to regular soda, or steaming foods in relation to frying). In some cases, children also
volunteered or were asked where they learned about an item being healthy or
unhealthy, although this prompt was implemented less systematically. Interviews
ranged from approximately 20 min to over one hour in length.
Parents could be present during these interviews if they chose, and a parent was
present for part or all of eight of the 13 interviews, although the degree to which they
participated varied. In no cases was more than one parent present for a given inter-
view. Regarding family member participation in interviews, we follow the approach
of Shweder (1996), who suggests that ‘members of a cultural community acquire
their culture through praxis; in other words, they resonate to, activate, or absorb
unarticulated concepts and principles through exposure to behaviour’ (Shweder,
1996, p. 33). Shweder states that:
members of the same culture share not only a language and specific customary behaviours,
but also an ‘evaluative discourse,’ and that the ‘value of culture for social analysis is not
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1958 S. Reeve and P. Bell
so much that the informants speak to the investigator, but that they speak to one another
and can be overheard’. (Hammel, 1990, quoted in Shweder, 1996, p. 33)
From this perspective, the way family members talk to each other about health beliefs
and practices is equally or perhaps even more illustrative of actual understandings
than an interview with the child alone. Thus, we did not ask that family members be
excluded from these conversations. In order to limit our analyses to health under-
standings with which the young people themselves are familiar, however, the ideas
described in this paper reflect only those actually stated by the children.
Participants
At the time of this task, the children ranged in age from nine years, eight months to
11 years, four months. Six of the children (four boys and two girls) were in the
fourth grade (9–10 years old), and seven (three boys and four girls) were in the fifth
grade (10–11 years).
Participants and their families came from a broad range of ethnic and mixed-
ethnic backgrounds, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, East African,
African-American, Haitian, Mexican, Samoan, and European-American. Eleven
of the children have parents who are first-generation immigrants to the USA, and
five of those 11 children themselves immigrated to the USA. In four out of the
13 homes, the primary language spoken is not English.
The elementary school from which our participants were recruited is in a lower-
income urban neighbourhood. Roughly 60% of children attending the school qualify
for free or reduced price lunch. Within our 13 families, however, socio-economic
status varies widely. Family structure also varies among the participant families.
Three of the 13 households consist of only one parent and one child, with an addi-
tional eight households having two resident parents and at least one child. In five
households, extended family members, such as an uncle or grandparent, either
currently live or have lived in the home during the course of our observations.
The neighbourhood where most of our families live is located in an industrial area
of a Pacific Northwest city, near a number of factories and a large airfield. Hospital-
isation rates for childhood asthma in this community are among the highest in the
county. Two of our 13 child participants suffer from severe or mild asthma, and
three either have or have had significant food allergies (to milk, nuts, seafood, and
other products).
Data Analysis
Each ethnographic interview was video-recorded and audio-recorded in the child’s
home. Tapes were then content-logged, a process by which the content of each
cassette is viewed and briefly described in a corresponding text document (cf.,
Jordan & Henderson, 1995). Content logs for the interview portion of the visit were
then expanded to include details of the interview, such as the questions researchers
asked and the children’s replies.
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1959
The video-recordings and content logs were analysed both for the localised
‘member meanings’ that individual children gave to the ideas ‘healthy’ and
‘unhealthy’, as well as for broader themes that multiple children addressed in
common. Individual member meanings and cross-case categories were derived as
much as possible from the children’s own words, although the groupings of them
across the cases, and in some examples groupings within a case, were imposed by the
researcher after the fact. For the quantitative analysis, in cases where a child
assigned multiple meanings to one item, the item was counted separately in each
category.
Explanations children provided about various items’ healthiness or unhealthiness
were not evaluated for their correctness or degree of alignment with accepted scien-
tific knowledge. Rather, we tried to understand from the children’s point of view,
through asking open-ended questions and probing about the children’s understand-
ings and experiences with each item, the meanings of health they chose to invoke. Our
purpose in this research was to describe the breadth of health concepts the children
chose to employ, as well as some of the everyday influences that contributed to these
concepts’ formation.
Results
The results described here build on a previous analysis of the member meanings and
activity contexts of three of the 13 children (Bell, Zimmerman, Bricker, & Lee, in
preparation). This paper presents only one additional in-depth case, but summarises
also the autodocumentation items and interview responses across all 13 children,
highlighting some of the main themes we encountered. The first segment of the
results section addresses the broader, cross-case analysis, and is followed by a closer
account of one child’s understandings.
Cross-case Analysis
Figures 1–4 show descriptive statistics for all the items described in our ethnographic
interviews with the 13 children. As seen in Figure 1, the children labelled a total of
269 items as being either healthy, unhealthy, or both healthy and unhealthy. For the
combined ‘healthy and unhealthy’ category, the degree of health either depended on
the context, or a given item was said to be ‘part healthy and part unhealthy’ simulta-
neously. For example, 1 nine-year-old boy described a commercially-made sweet
cinnamon bread as ‘half healthy and half not healthy’; the healthy half was the bread,
while the unhealthy half was that it was ‘covered in brown sugar’.
Figure 1. ‘Healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ items ( n = 269)
Figure 2 shows the items the children chose to photograph, write about, or
discuss, as grouped into everyday categories (i.e., food and drink, household items,
activities, etc.).
2
As shown in the chart, over 60% of the items children discussed
were either food or non-alcoholic beverages. Of the remaining 40%, however, chil-
dren discussed a range of other items, including plants and trees, medications, drugs
and alcohol, and a variety of activities, such as exercise, reading, watching television,
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1960 S. Reeve and P. Bell
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
Healthy Healthy and unhealthyUnhealthy
% of total items
Figure 1. ‘Healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ items (n = 269)
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
food/drink (non-alcoholic)
plants/trees
activities
drugs/alcohol/cigarettes
pollution/litter
other
household objects
self/people
medications
% of total items
Figure 2. Items documented by the 13 focal participants, displayed by type
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1961
or playing computer games. In a few cases, children also photographed themselves
or close family members as examples of being healthy.
Figure 2. Items documented by the 13 focal participants, displayed by type
As stated above, the emphasis in the data on health-related objects may partially
be an artefact of the protocol, since we asked the children to avoid taking pictures of
any people outside their families in order to preserve their privacy. Some children
did, however, describe specific people they considered to be healthy either verbally
or in journal entries, such as a friend who had recently recovered from an illness or a
gym teacher who eats healthily and exercises. Some children also included pictures
they had taken of themselves.
Each individual child discussed the majority of his or her items in terms of their
effects on human health, and five of the 13 children explained their items’ degree of
healthiness exclusively in this respect (see Figure 3). An additional five children also
explained health in terms of the effects on nature or the environment, and six chil-
dren described items in their interview as being in a state of health or lack thereof
(see Table 1 for additional detail).
Figure 3. Item categories
For slightly less than one-half of the items, a child either volunteered or research-
ers asked the child where he or she learned about the healthiness or unhealthiness of
a particular item he or she chose to include. Figure 4 shows the children’s attribu-
tions for the sources of their knowledge. The two most important sources children
0.0
10.0
20.0
30.0
40.0
50.0
60.0
70.0
80.0
90.0
100.0
Healthy for people
In a state of health/unhealth
Healthy for nature/envir.
% of total items
Figure 3. Item categories
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1962 S. Reeve and P. Bell
cited for their understandings of health are school (32%) and their parents (32%);
all but one child cited more than one source for his or her knowledge. Within each
child’s interview, parents and school were often the leading sources cited, but in
some cases television shows or a child’s personal experiences were more frequently
mentioned.
Figure 4. Knowledge sources ( n = 123)
Although space does not permit a more thorough analysis of children’s knowledge
sources in this paper, the data in Figure 4 indicate the importance of understanding
a broad range of children’s everyday activities with respect to their understandings of
personal health. They also suggest the appropriateness of employing a conceptual
Table 1. Three applications of the terms ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’
Application Sample response
Healthy/unhealthy for humans ‘This picture is healthy because it’s, it’s a banana
tree that is going to produce bananas … and the
bananas will become healthy for people to eat
and will help people to live’ (9-year-old girl)
Healthy/unhealthy for nature or
environment
‘Oil leaks are unhealthy because it kills sea
animals trapped in the oil’ (11-year-old boy)
In a state of health or lack thereof (healthy
entity)
‘My gym teacher is healthy, … because he eats a
lot of nutritious stuff … and he exercises a lot,
too’ (10-year-old girl)
Figure 4. Knowledge sources (n = 123)
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1963
ecology framework, since the children described multi-faceted understandings of
health derived from a variety of sources. The ethnographic nature of our research
allows us to draw on both our observations of these children over a significant time
period and their explicit interview statements, to map out potential origins of and
influences on their health understandings. We argue that such analyses, built upon
data-sets gathered from across the social settings frequented by youth, play a vital
role in understanding the development of children’s conceptions of health and the
activities and people that influence them.
These findings about the sources of children’s understandings also imply that
school-based health and science curricula must take out-of-school activities into
account. If this is not done, the versions of health learned inside the classroom may
continue to be separate from and have little influence on what is learned and prac-
ticed outside it.
3
Across all 13 cases, the items on which children chose to focus and their explana-
tions about them described a surprising breadth of meanings for the concept of
health. Table 2 presents the various categories children used to explain why the
items they photographed were healthy or unhealthy, along with the total number of
items for which each definition was invoked and one or two illustrative examples of
interview responses. As described above, these categories were imposed on the data
by the researchers after looking across all interviews. In deriving these categories,
however, we have attempted to remain as close as possible to the children’s actual
words and/or intent in the context of the interview. Subsequent analyses might
interpret children’s responses in light of the specific contexts of everyday life being
documented through the ethnography.
As shown in Table 2, the children drew on a variety of aspects of health in explain-
ing their thoughts about the items they chose to capture or write about. The most
frequently cited explanations involved a specific outcome from a healthy or
unhealthy object or activity, such as causing illness, damaging a specific part of the
body, healing cuts, or causing accidents. Ten out of the 13 children used this expla-
nation for at least one of their items. Weight gain or loss was also cited many times
as an indicator of health, with weight gain always seen as unhealthy and weight loss
as healthy. Although this category was addressed on fewer items overall than the
illness/injury category, it was more widely present across the children, being cited by
11 out of the 13 for at least one item.
The category entitled ‘Food Pyramid’ encompasses a number of relatively unelab-
orated explanations children gave that correspond to the guidelines in the Food
Pyramid produced by the US Department of Agriculture (www.mypyramid.gov),
such as several servings daily of whole grains and fruits and vegetables, moderate
amounts of cheese, meat, and other proteins, and small amounts of sweets and oils.
Explanations placed in this category included explanations such as ‘nuts are good for
you’, or ‘all fruit is healthy’ (see examples in Table 2). Children did not explicitly
invoke the Food Pyramid itself during their interviews, although it is safe to assume
from our classroom observations that they had all participated in instruction
about it.
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1964 S. Reeve and P. Bell
Table 2. Children’s definitions of health (associated with 316 total responses)
Definition/category Frequency Sample responses
Causes or cures illness
or injury
61 ‘… if you eat too much [chocolate], you might get obese, and then you might get cancer, and then get a
heart attack and die. If you eat too much … And you might get cavities’ (10-year-old boy)
‘[Apple juice] makes you see better, makes your skin softer … I used to have, like, cuts right here, but
now it’s, like, all healed’ (10-year-old boy)
Weight gain/loss 42 ‘I learned that aerobic exercise is, um, exercise that contains [sic] your heart to beat faster, which could
lead people to lose weight. So, if like someone was to walk every day, it wouldn’t really help them if they
were trying to lose weight because, um, their heart isn’t beating faster’ (10-year-old girl)
‘If you eat too much cheese, … it has a little bit of fattening in it. So if you eat too much, you’ll get
wider’ (9-year-old boy)
‘Food Pyramid’ 40 ‘[Multi-grain cereal is] good, because grains are good’ (10-year-old girl)
Spaghetti is healthy ‘cause you get your meat’ (9-year-old boy)
Vitamins/minerals/
‘nutrition’
27 ‘Apples are healthy, since they carry a lot of vitamins … Fruits in general always carry a lot of vitamins’
(11-year-old boy)
‘[An orange is] healthy because it has a lot of vitamin C and, um, it has a lot of nutrition in it’ (10-year-
old girl)
Growth/strength/
natural colour
23 ‘[meat] makes you grow and it makes you strong’ (10-year-old boy)
A houseplant is ‘healthy because it grows really fast … faster than most plants’ (11-year-old girl)
Organic/fresh/natural 20 Organic vegetables are healthy, ‘because it doesn’t have pesticide on it’ (10-year-old girl)
‘Good sugar comes from fruits, but bad sugar comes from, like, artificial stuff’ (10-year-old boy)
Environmental health 16 ‘Cars have gas and the gas pollutes the sky and that can cause global warming, which is not healthy for
living creatures and people’ (9-year-old girl)
‘Smoke is unheathy [sic] for your lungs and nature. It could destroy trees and plants’ (11-year-old boy)
Germs/bacteria/
spoiled food
13 Spoiled mango is unhealthy because ‘I’ll get food poisoning’ (10-year-old girl)
‘[This octopus is] unhealthy ‘cause it’s raw … it might have something BAD in it, like, um, some, like a
germ. The octopus might be sick, and then they ate it. [If] you cook it, … then it burns … all the germs,
but then it also burns the nutrition’ (10-year-old girl)
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1965
Table 2. (Continued)
Definition/category Frequency Sample responses
Energy 12 ‘When, like, you’re tired and stuff … you just eat fruit and … you’ll have more energy’ (10-year-old boy)
‘[A water bottle] is healthy … because, you, um, if you drink out of it you can get energy, lots of it’
(9-year-old boy)
Emotional/mental
health
12 A rose from her mother is healthy because ‘it brings love the love smells deeply inside of the petals’
(9-year-old girl)
‘[Reading] keeps your mind alert and thinking’ (11-year-old boy)
Sustain human life 10 ‘I think [a tree is] a healthy source, because it helps provide oxygen for us to breathe in and stay alive …
It provides a source of, like, energy that we need to survive’ (11-year-old boy)
‘Drugs’ 10 ‘Coffee’s bad for you because it has caffeine, and caffeine’s like a, like a drug. Sort of’ (10-year-old boy)
Taste/smell
a
10 ‘[This plant] seemed like it would be healthy, just because there’s so much green in it, and a lot of
natural scents’ (9-year-old girl)
Clean/dirty 9 ‘Clean clothes … [are] healthy, because they are clean, and you can wear them’ (9-year-old boy)
Exercise 6 ‘[Exercise] can keep you fit, and it can also like unclog your arteries, and burns calories, too’
(11-year-old boy)
Aesthetic wholeness
(one child only)
5 ‘The stairway … [is] healthy, because there are not very many gouges in the wood’ (9-year-old boy)
a
Taste or smell was in almost all cases a secondary, and not a primary, justification for an item’s health or lack thereof.
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1966 S. Reeve and P. Bell
In a general sense, the majority of meanings provided by the children related
either to the absence of illness or disease or to the ability to do desired things. The
most frequently mentioned category of explanations, causing or curing illness or
injury, is explicitly related to the absence of illness. Meanings related to weight gain
were sometimes phrased either in terms of subsequent illness or an inability to do
desired activities, such as run fast on the playground. Also, although not explicitly
called out by the children, meanings designated in the ‘Food Pyramid’ and germs/
bacteria/spoiled foods categories are implicitly related to keeping the body disease-
free and functioning optimally. The children’s frequent association of health with
either the absence of disease/illness or the ability to do desired things is compatible
with the findings of Natapoff (1978) and Boruchovitch and Mednick (1997),
discussed earlier in this paper.
Other meanings discussed by the children in our study fell into the categories of
mental and emotional health; environmental health; organic or ‘natural’ foods;
health as determined by growth, strength, or colour; cleanliness; and elements of the
natural environment that help to sustain human life (e.g., trees that produce oxygen,
air for people to breathe). Each child described health from multiple perspectives,
often giving explanations that incorporated different definitions of health for the
same item, or that described complex and nuanced ideas. Their responses also
revealed meanings that serve specific functions for the children and are rooted in
activities that are important to them and their families.
For example, Wendy, a 10-year-old girl, photographed an octopus dish her
mother prepared for a friend’s birthday party. After describing the different parts
of the octopus in the photograph and how it was prepared, Wendy told the
researchers that the dish is unhealthy because it is raw, and might have germs in it.
When asked if there is a way to make it more healthy, Wendy suggested: ‘[If] you
cook it, … then it burns … all the germs, but then it also burns the nutrition’.
From analysing Wendy’s responses in this interview segment, we were able to see
two main points. First, our conversation elicited ideas not only about healthy and
unhealthy, but also about food preparation, likes and dislikes of family members,
and the context in which she saw this food. In accordance with diSessa (2002),
Wendy’s concept of the octopus’s degree of healthiness is not unitary, but is
connected to a web of related ideas and situational specifics relevant to her.
Second, her understanding of the consequences of cooking octopus actually relates
to a common activity system in the Chung home—that of making juices from
fruits and vegetables. Wendy’s comment about ‘[burning] the nutrition’ out of the
octopus at first seems unconventional, but on further examination we see that it is
related to her understanding of how their family’s juicer works. As she explained in
a subsequent interview:
This machine [juicer] is, like made to, um, keep the minerals. Like cause sometimes when
you blend things, um, the blender creates a lot of heat, and then it … like, burns the um,
healthy stuff? But then this [points to the arms of the juicer] is like magnetic to the
proteins and stuff, so that it sticks on, so then when the juice comes out, then it still has
the protein … So then it’s still healthy and natural, except made into juice.
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1967
Wendy’s statements suggest that she has applied her understanding of the juicer’s
advertised nutrition-enhancing properties (i.e., retaining the healthy qualities of
fruits and vegetables through avoiding excessive heat) to the preparation of other
foods, including cooking meat. Her ideas about the health of the octopus dish are
thus related to her knowledge of family members and common home practices, in
addition to her understanding about the presence of germs in raw foods. They are
rooted in everyday activities and encompass a number of different conceptual and
pragmatic dimensions, consistent with a conceptual ecology or knowledge systems
view of children’s ideas about health.
The data cited here show that our participants assign a wider variation of mean-
ings to the term ‘health’ than is recognised in either the materials or the instruction
offered through their school health curriculum, creating a potential gap between
teaching and learning in these situations. Invoking the concept of ‘health’ does not
simply call up a one-dimensional idea for them, but activates a web of meanings
about weight loss, the environment, emotions, specific illnesses, personal experi-
ence, and other topics. In accordance with diSessa (2002), it seems that changing a
child’s understanding of aspects of health entails much more than creating a path
from concept A to concept B. Curriculum and teaching strategies that undervalue
the influence of previous experience on children’s ideas, and the nuanced complexity
those ideas may assume in different situational frames, could endanger the process
of real conceptual change.
Case Study
One child in particular, a nine-year-old boy named Sam, used an unusually large
number and breadth of definitions in describing the items he photographed. Sam is
an only child who lives with his two parents. His mother is Chinese and was born in
Guatemala, and his father is Caucasian and is originally from the Northwestern
USA. Sam considers his ethnicity to be Chinese. English is the main language
spoken in Sam’s home.
Sam photographed, made videos of, or verbally referenced a total of 40 separate
items during his interview. Since the average number of items cited by each child
was 21, Sam captured many more items than most of our other participants. In the
analysis that follows, we discuss the various meanings of health Sam described, as
well as some potential sources for his understandings.
The meaning of health that Sam cited most frequently was weight gain or loss: Sam
discussed weight gain with reference to a chocolate doughnut, eggs, cinnamon bread,
bacon, milk, cheese, cake, and dried berries. For example, Sam described bacon as
unhealthy, saying ‘If you eat too much grease, and pig fat, you kind of weigh more,
and stuff. It’s harder to move and run faster’. Sam and a few of our other participants
also used the term ‘fattening’ differently from its conventional, adjectival form. In
describing cheese, for example, Sam said ‘It has a little bit of fattening in it. So if you
eat too much, you’ll get wider’. Children’s use of the word ‘fattening’ (and in one
case, ‘addiction’) to mean objects that are contained within substances was striking.
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1968 S. Reeve and P. Bell
In Sam’s case, he also described a doughnut in his interview as being ‘fattening’, a
usage that is more culturally familiar. Sam thus used the word ‘fattening’ both as a
noun, something in the cheese that makes you wider, and as an adjective, a charac-
teristic of the doughnut. We can only speculate about the origin of this noun usage of
‘fattening’ and ‘addiction’, since the children who employed it came from different
school classes, grade levels, and family backgrounds. It indicates, however, that some
children may be understanding health terms that are common in our current culture
differently from their intended or technical meanings. It may be part of an everyday
linguistic register for food-related ideas.
Sam also invoked many of the other health meanings commonly used among chil-
dren in our study, such as causing illness or injury (e.g., beer, a hot iron, playing too
many computer games); growth, strength, and colour (e.g., houseplants, trees in the
yard, Sam’s healthy teeth and gums); and explanations aligning with the ‘Food
Pyramid’ (e.g., dried fruit, spaghetti, commercial health drink). Besides these,
however, Sam captured a much wider breadth of items than most children, and
invoked definitions that few or no other children did. For example, one of the ways
Sam defined items as healthy was for their aesthetic wholeness or ‘lack of being
broken’. Regarding a short video he made of a stairway in his home, Sam described
it as ‘healthy, because there are not very many gouges in the wood’. Similarly, Sam
described the shower in the family’s downstairs bathroom as ‘healthy … cause the tile
is all good and together. Everything is stable’. Healthy in this sense seems to be a
reference to the design purity (or state) of material objects. Sam also invoked a
definition of health as things that are clean or new, as with a pile of clean clothes in
the laundry room as healthy, or a description of rusty tools as unhealthy.
Figure 5 is a representation of some of the meanings Sam assigned to the idea of
‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, together with some related activity systems in which he
participates and knowledge sources he cited explicitly during his interview. There
seem to be two major influences on how Sam approached the self-documentation
task: first, his parents and perhaps other family members; and second, Sam’s interest
in technology and building.
Figure 5. Everyday expertise representation of healthy and unhealthy for one case (Sam)
Sam spends quite a bit of time with family members, including his parents, a grand-
parent, and cousins. He makes explicit mention in the interview of how his parents
have told him that cheese can be ‘fattening’ (Sam describes this as having ‘fattening
in it’), that too much egg yolk ‘makes you start to get wider instead of taller’, and that
the skin of an apple is healthy. Researchers have observed some discussion in the home
about exercise and the importance of staying active, which probably relates to Sam’s
mention of too much television and video games as unhealthy because they make you
‘turn into a couch potato’. Sam says that Laser Tag, on the other hand, is healthy
because ‘you get exercise while running and shooting lasers at each other’.
At the end of the interview, one of the researchers asked Sam where he thinks he
has learned about what is healthy and unhealthy.
Sam: If I couldn’t figure it out, just best guess.
Rudy (father): Mom and Dad didn’t teach you anything, huh?
Sam: Ha, ha. Yes you did. Most of that, I got from you guys.
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1969
Although he never referenced it explicitly in describing his items, Sam’s school
class was also doing a unit on food chemistry at the time of this interview. Sam
told the researchers that his class was learning about ‘Foods. Foods and if they’re
healthy, not healthy. And what consequences you would have if they weren’t
healthy’.
The second major influence on Sam’s completion of the healthy/unhealthy docu-
mentation task seems to have been his interest in technology and building things.
Sam’s father is skilled in computer repair, and Sam has a deep interest in technology
and a facility for patiently reading instructions and learning how to operate or build
things. This interest may relate to the large number of pictures and videos Sam took
with the camera (e.g., pictures related to aesthetic wholeness), especially because this
was the first time in the research study that we gave children this kind of photodocu-
mentation task. Sam told the researchers during his interview that he figured out on
his own how to take videos with the camera, and ended up filling the entire memory
card with videos and photographs. A number of the items he photographed represent
the technology present in his home (television, video games, computer). Sam stated
that too much of all of these things is potentially unhealthy, again perhaps relating to
the emphasis in his home on getting exercise and being active.
Figure 5. Everyday expertise representation of healthy and unhealthy for one case (Sam)
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1970 S. Reeve and P. Bell
Sam’s case is a strong illustration of the unexpected variety of definitions children
may associate with the terms ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’. As discussed earlier, it
suggests that designing health interventions that are relevant and connected to
children’s thinking presents a more complex task than has sometimes been assumed.
Conclusion
Children’s understandings of health can be more complex than has been traditionally
assumed. As mentioned in the Introduction, a significant fraction of the prior
research on children’s health has focused specifically on concepts of illness. Although
the children in our study did frequently discuss health in terms of an absence of
disease or an ability to do desired activities, they also perceived healthy things (includ-
ing trees, air, clean clothes, rusty tools, and litter) as falling into more than these two
categories. Our findings support the idea that health and illness are not opposing ends
of a continuum, but rather are overlapping but distinct concepts for children. The
children in our study invoked a broad range of definitions for health, including
accepted nutritional guidelines, plant growth, pleasing tastes and smells, effects on
weight gain, freedom from germs or from artificial processing, aesthetic wholeness,
and cleanliness. The data described here clearly lend themselves to a conceptual ecol-
ogy frame in the pattern diSessa (2002) outlines, in that these children treat the
concept of ‘health’ as a multidimensional network of ideas, composed of multiple and
related knowledge elements. Instruction that focuses on simple, unitary definitions of
health is not likely to coordinate well with the rich understandings these children have
associated with multiple contexts and meanings. We know too little about how those
knowledge elements, understandings, and associations might or might not be invoked
by the teaching of formal health curricula. What might be the positive or negative
results of neglecting some entirely, or of emphasising a few at the expense of others?
Bruner contended that ‘any subject can be taught effectively in an intellectually
honest form to any child at any stage of development’ (1960, p. 33). In order to do
this, however, the content must be ‘translated into [the child’s] way of thinking’
(Bruner, 1960, p. 39). As illustrated by the research described here, many current
health curricula have insufficiently considered children’s ways of thinking, and are
thus unable to build on their existing understandings. Health instruction must go
beyond topics whose importance have been determined solely by adults, and involve
children more actively in examining and developing their own ideas.
Finally, the work cited here, together with a number of other studies in the litera-
ture, discuss only children’s conceptions of health and what it means to them to be
healthy or unhealthy, the children’s health beliefs. Perhaps more important and
necessary, however, for the overall goal of promoting children’s health is connecting
this knowledge of children’s conceptions to an understanding of what motivates
their actual behaviours and practices, and to what extent beliefs such as those cited
here are relevant in health decision-making. The ethnographic study in which this
work is embedded provides a unique opportunity to relate children’s stated beliefs
with observations of theirs and their family members’ actual decisions and activities.
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Children’s Conceptions of Health 1971
We continue to research and analyse this issue, which is a vital next step in research
on children’s health.
Notes
1. Although some scholars distinguish between ‘disease’, which relates to biological pathologies,
and ‘illness’, which also includes the patient’s emotional and social experience of the disease
state, most of the articles cited here use the term ‘illness’ to encompass both meanings.
2. The total number of items in Figure 2 differs slightly from that in Figure 1: in the case of nine
items, children gave no explicit statement about whether they were healthy or unhealthy.
3. We also recognise that self-reported influences may significantly understate the actual range of
influences on learning.
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Appendix. Prompt for self-documentation task about health
Keep a photo journal for a week!
This Week
: You can help us learn
by taking pictures and writing about
the range of things that you think are
healthy
and unhealthy.
Over the next week or so, we want you to keep a journal:
● Take a picture or write down anything you come across that reminds you of
things that are ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’.
● You can collect printed materials, draw pictures, or add things like charts in your
journal too if they help you explain what you saw.
Take pictures of what you see.
Write down in your journal:
● what you saw,
● where you saw it,
● when you saw it, and
● why it reminds you of healthy or
unhealthy
● Only take pictures though when you know
you’re allowed to!
● When you take a picture, take pictures
of things
, not people.
● Try not to get any people in the picture because we will not have asked them if it
is okay to take their picture. Instead, write about it in your journal.
● Next time we meet, we will talk about what is in your journal and talk about your
pictures.
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1974 S. Reeve and P. Bell
Reviewing the Photos Before Our Next Meeting
Before our next meeting, you need to look at your pictures.
● Make sure that you were free to take each picture and that you asked permission if
you needed to.
● Make sure you don’t have people in your pictures, only things.
● Make sure you feel okay about sharing each picture with us.
● Delete any picture that you don’t want to show us.
● Before we come over, show each of the pictures to your mom or your dad. They
can make sure the pictures are okay too. They should delete any picture they
don’t want us to see.
When we meet with you next week, we will ask you questions about the things you
wrote and took pictures of that you think are healthy and unhealthy.
Let us know if you have any questions.
You can email or call us at:
Thank you & we’ll see you next week!
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