This report concerns the important empirical question of measuring distress experienced by a child while coming to terms with his or her own life-threatening illness. Nineteen fatally and chronically ill outpatient children were assessed in seven areas of personality functioning with seven different measurement methods. Inspection of the multitrait-multimethod correlation matrix indicates: that there are important differences in measures of distress that are thought to be roughly the same; and that, in general, the most common empirical methods are poorly fitted to the task of understanding the distress of fatally or chronically ill children.
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