The influence of psychological threat, coping style and perceived personality trait upon the head and neck cancer patients’ family members’ truth telling attitude.

• Main Authors: Xing-Hau Wang, 王興豪
• Other Authors: Chun-Yu Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2012
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28888057459854261302

碩士 === 中原大學 === 心理學研究所 === 100 === Background and purpose：Cancer is an important issue in Taiwan, because it would affect a person’s health very much. Although many informations focued on the patient and the disease, fewer informations were put an eye on their caregivers and families. Truth telling is the most common topic when we talk to cancer family communication. In this study, we’ll use the stress coping and cognive appraisal model to understand the the truth telling attitude through different situation of head and neck cancer patient’s relatives. Also, we’ll try to find out how the threat of disease, the threat of death, coping style, and perceived personality trait of nervous influence the truth telling attitude. Methods：This study was a corss sectional design, and the data collection was from a medical center in Taoyuan after the Institutional Review Board’s agreement. Subjects were the relatives of the patients who diagnosised the head and neck cancer, included 61 spouses and 39 children. The instruments are the basic information questionnaire, Truth Telling Attitude Survey, Brief COPE, NEO-FFI neurosis factor and the Threat Index – Taiwan version. The statistical analysis included Chi- square, ANOVA and discrimant analysis. Results：This study discovered the overall attitude of the head and neck cancer patient’s relatives are very high. After the compare attitude of different situation, the attitude toward diagnosis and the therapy plan are higher than the attitude toward prognosis related information (included the tumor metastasis, tumor recurred or the terminal cancer). Also this study found that the different relationship which is spouse or child and the patient’s education level would have a significant different between the high, medium and low attitude group. Furthermore, the avoidance coping style and the threat of death were influential variables when trying to discriminate different truth telling attitude. And the variables in this study had a middle correct rate through discriminate analysis. Conculsion：This study tried to measure the truth telling attitude through the psychometric and quantity method, and found that coping style, threat of death and relationship had an influence on it. This study offered some new information in truth telling attitude. Further study can try to measure the truth telling attitude on different cancer diagnosis and also try to figure out what kind of psychological variable would contribute the difference truth telling attitude between spouses and child.