| Summary: | Breast cancer is a disease that affects many thousands of Canadian women every year.
Battling such a disease often involves an arduous and highly invasive regime of
eradicative medical treatment, including perhaps surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and/or
hormonal therapy. A growing body of literature is available which aims at illuminating
the various experiences women undergo while receiving such medical treatment. While
the majority of the available literature focuses on studies of a quantitative nature, a few
are in existence which report on qualitative studies, studies where women undergoing the
process of treatment for breast cancer are viewed as the "experts" of this process. The
aim of this study was to explore the experiences of twelve women, aged from 41 to 70
years (M= 55 years old) who underwent eradicative medical treatment for breast cancer,
from their own perspectives. To this end, the critical incident technique was used
(Flannagan, 1954), through which women were asked to identify, during audiotaped
interviews, experiences which both helped and hindered their treatment processes. Each
of the twelve participants, or co-researchers, were interviewed twice; from these
interviews, a total of 453 critical incidents were identified, and used to develop 15
thematic categories of experience for the participants involved: (a) relations with the
medical team and any support staff (helpful vs. hindering), (b) medical treatment and
services (helpful vs. hindering), (c) personal support (helpful vs. hindering), (d)
activities/things which aid in treatment and recovery (or which did not help), (e) locus of
control (helped vs. hindered), (f) availability and presentation of appropriate educational
information (helpful vs. hindering), (g) attitude towards life and the human community
(helpful), (h) support/psychoeducational agencies/groups/centres (helpful vs. hindering),
(i) maternal/caregiving role/behavior (helpful vs. hindering), (j) career as a medical
professional (helpful vs. hindering), (k) spiritual beliefs (helpful), (1) career (helpful vs.
hindering), (m) personal involvement in decision making (helpful), (n) physical
appearance (helpful vs. hindering), and (o) alternative treatments (helpful). Category
validity was tested through four procedures: (a) cross-checking by the co-researchers, of
the incidents (and their appropriate category placement) during the second interviews, (b)
exhaustiveness of the categories, where two complete interviews were put aside, and their
incidents later placed in the already existing 15 formed categories, (c) the services of an
external rater, who independently placed 100 of the 453 critical incidents into the already
existing categories, and (d) linking the categories to some of the existing literature on
theories related to counselling psychology, particularly those involving crisis, transition
and resiliency, implications for counselling research and practice are briefly discussed.
|
|---|
