Background: Women with advanced breast cancer often experience significant pain. Previous studies indicate that spirituality may serve as a resource to alter pain perceptions; yet, the role of spirituality in pain management has not been examined as a lived experience among this population. Objective: This study qualitatively explored how women with advanced breast cancer describe their experiences with spirituality, pain, and how they perceived their spirituality as influencing their pain. Interventions/Methods: Guided by Self-transcendence Theory, a phenomenological approach was taken. Women were recruited via tumor registry mailings through a community cancer center. Face-to-face semistructured interviews (N = 9) were conducted. An inductive, interpretive data analysis approach was used, using open-coding thematic analysis conducted by 2 investigators. Results: Participants were Caucasian and Christian, with a mean age of 61 years. Findings revealed the complex, multidimensional nature of pain and broad encompassing experiences of spirituality. Themes included: (1) spirituality provides positive cognitive framing to help face pain; (2) spirituality elicited supportive emotions such as peace and tranquility despite pain; (3) spiritual practices serve as pain self-management tools; and (4) connection with others and service activities (aspects of spirituality) help women cope with pain. Conclusions: While various routes were mentioned, most women found spirituality to alter pain experiences in supportive ways. Greater attention to spirituality may open new avenues of research and expand insights for development of nurse-designed pain management interventions. What is Foundational: Women with advanced stage breast cancer identify pain as a total (physical, cognitive and emotional) experience that needs another total experience to overcome it. Spirituality is an intentional total experience that quiets the mind, and keeps the women in the present moment with a positive cognitive frame and altered positive emotional states including peace and tranquility.
France provides an ideal context for beginning to understand how schooling affects students' understanding of their national identity. In this article, Kyle Greenwalt examines the discursive practices through which a group of French secondary students constructed their national identity. Following an appraisal of the historiographical literature of nineteenth-century French nation-building, the author proceeds with a phenomenological analysis of the discourses students used to make sense of their lived experiences with teachers and schooling. Greenwalt evaluates the continued presence and salience of traditional versions of French national identity, suggesting the need to reconsider the relationships among social solidarity, pluralism, and national identity and calling into question the contemporary relevance of structural representations of the nation-state.
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