BACKGROUND: Psychological stress is a general and non-specific factor associated with many health conditions, including Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD). It is related not only to external stressors but also to internal characteristics which enhance patients\' vulnerability to stress.
OBJECTIVE: To identify specific psychological characteristics of pediatric IBD related to stress.
METHODS: A case-control-cohort study that compared the psychological characteristics of 49 patients and 56 comparisons. The psychological characteristics were defined by four belief types - beliefs about self, general beliefs, beliefs about norms, and goals - which refer to a set of specific themes.
RESULTS: The belief types differentiated between the two groups, and the patients were characterized by six themes: like routines, strive to get others\' love, caring about the body and the health, doing things only at their own pace, expressing negative emotion without regulations, and feeling over-identification with others. Patients\' likelihood of being characterized by the themes is 2.18 to 2.90 times higher than the comparisons.
CONCLUSIONS: Children with IBD are characterized by a set of specific psychological characteristics. These characteristics were discussed mainly concerning generating chronic stress (e.g., over-identification with others) and interpersonal conflicts (e.g., doing things only at their own pace) among the patients.
CONCLUSIONS: It is suggested to healthcare workers to be aware of the specific psychological characteristics of children with IBD, and sensitive to these characteristics during interactions with them. Besides, the characteristics may pave the way for developing a targeted psychological intervention that corresponds specifically to the patients\' needs.

Single-case designs are typically used in classroom and clinical settings to assess the behavioral impacts of an intervention with an individual child. Using two illustrative case studies, this article describes the extension of this model to home-visitation programs serving tribal communities and examines the lessons learned throughout the process of adapting this approach. Our experience suggests that the benefits of using this design outweigh the associated challenges and allows researchers to expand the use of single-case designs to previously unexplored settings. Specifically, some of the benefits discussed include allowing for evaluative rigor in contexts with small samples, allowing everyone who qualifies to immediately participate, providing visual representations of the outcome-making the results more tangible and accessible to a broader audience, and allowing for a deep level of cultural sensitivity. The article also provides some general guidelines to address the practical challenges one may face when attempting to use single-case designs in novel ways within nonschool settings.