Hospitalization and the adolescent patient: a review and some critical questions.

Fifty articles spanning a 30-year period were selected as representative of the literature concerning the effects of hospitalization on the nonpsychiatric adolescent patient. Areas to emerge from this analysis were the effects of illness, visitor preference, sex and age differences, patient self-reports, posthospitalization behaviors, and methods of caring for the adolescent patient. The direction in which the literature has moved as well as a number of critical areas for future research are presented.