UNCOVERING CHILD’S VIEW BY TAILORED INTERVIEWING 89 4 Introduction With the increasing focus of healthcare providers on person-centred care, it is important to capture the views and experiences, wants and needs of care receivers, for example children. Especially for occupational therapists, uncovering the child perspective is important to know what activities are meaningful. It is important that children can express their own experiences because parents cannot always reliably represent the child’s perspective (Brook & Boaz, 2005; Hart & Chesson, 1998; Runeson et al., 2001). This is also advocated by Morris (2003) who claims that all children and young people, including children with cognitive and communication disabilities, have something to communicate. To uncover children’s perspectives, understanding their individual capacities is a prerequisite for being able to communicate in a way that suits their communication capacities. The interviewer just needs to find ways of understanding their views and experiences. Adapting communication to children with a disorder is not a fixed method, as they can have a large range of symptoms and impairments. For instance, in children with mitochondrial disorder three functional profiles fitting with different levels of cognition were acknowledged (Lindenschot et al., 2018). The communication level within these three profiles varies from non-functional (non)verbal communication to sufficient abilities to make themselves understandable. The large variety in cognitive and communication capacities makes interviewing these children a challenge for an interviewer. In general, interviewing children is a two-way process that can be conceptualized in terms of moment-to-moment transactions (Gilstrap & Ceci, 2005). Children and interviewers can co-regulate each other’s affects, thoughts, behaviours, goals and words. Following this conception, Saywitz et al. (2017) suggest that an “oneprotocol-fits-all” approach may be too restrictive, for example young children versus teenagers. Even three-year-old children can describe situations vividly and can recall experiences of adverse events, such as illness and hospitalization (Docherty & Sandelowski, 1999). Children develop ‘scripts’ of familiar situations and experiences from an early age. These scripts are used as the primary means to anticipate, comprehend, and re-create real life experiences (Nelson, 1986). Children have to think in logical concepts, connecting obtained information and experiences. Age and developmental level affect a children’s ability to mentally distinguish between information, to think independently about elements, to analyse abstract elements separately from perceived meaning (Toomela et al., 2020) and to communicate their experiences (Docherty & Sandelowski, 1999). Interaction with the socio-cultural environment and education ensures the development of logical conceptual thinking (Murnikov & Kask, 2021; Toomela, 2016). As the understanding of words and their meaning improves, the ability to reflect and reason progresses,
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