In this article, the authors discuss their experiences of two separate research projects involving interviews with both partners in care relationships that pushed the ethics of research methods along unfamiliar routes. The desire to understand the relationship from both sides was seen to outweigh the perils of accessing both stories but only when the ethical and procedural elements had been sufficiently worked through. It is those ethical and procedural elements that they share in this article, which is offered as a provocative nudge toward a continued critical appraisal of ethical standards within qualitative research and begins with the authors' reflection on their processes for such research through the examination of a fictionalized vignette.

This article is a critical reflection on the process of creating transcripts and sharing them with interviewees. It relates to two elements of the research process: first, sharing transcripts with research participants and, second, participants' seeing extracts from transcripts in academic writing. The authors explore participants' experiences of revisiting the interview in written form by reflecting on the interconnections between social research methods and epistemology. They also consider the ethical implications of this process. They consider the relationship between the transcript and the representation (re-presentation) of what participants believe to have occurred within the interview. This leads to a discussion of the importance of developing reflexivity with respect to the practice and processes of sharing transcripts.

Our findings add to existing knowledge of supportive care needs for men living with prostate cancer. We suggest that studies exploring supportive care need to remain mindful of the disruption that cancer causes both during and after treatment, the complexity of such experience and respective demands on supportive care.

The slow escalation of involvement is in part because of the myriad ways in which it is conceptualised and discussed. Thus, we conclude that one of the greatest barriers to truly integrating patient involvement into health services, policy and research is the conceptual muddle with which involvement is articulated, understood and actioned. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE. Clinicians need to be supported to seek clarity in the use and operationalisation of involvement if the agenda is to be truly adopted and strengthened.

BackgroundLittle is known about adolescents’ cancer awareness and help-seeking behaviour in Britain. This study assessed adolescents’: awareness of cancer symptoms, common cancers, and the relationship between cancer and age; anticipated delay and perceived barriers to seeking medical advice; and examined variation by age, gender, ethnicity and whether individuals knew someone with cancer.MethodsA survey was conducted using a modified paper version of the Cancer Awareness Measure (CAM). The sample included 478 adolescents (male: n = 250, 52.3%) aged 11–17 years old (mean = 13.8, SD = 1.24) recruited from four British schools between August and October 2011.ResultsAdolescents’ cancer awareness was low. Half of all adolescents did not know the most common childhood (51%) or teenage (49%) cancers and most (69%) believed cancer was unrelated to age. Awareness of cancer symptoms was significantly higher among older adolescents (aged 13–17 years) (p = 0.003) and those who knew someone with cancer (p < 0.001). Three-quarters (74%) of adolescents indicated they would seek help for a symptom they thought might be cancer within 3 days, and half (48%) within 24 hours. The most endorsed barriers to help-seeking were ‘worry about what the doctor might find’ (72%), being ‘too embarrassed’ (56%), ‘too scared’ (54%) and ‘not feeling confident to talk about symptoms’ (53%). Endorsement of these emotional barriers was significantly higher among females (p ≤ 0.001).ConclusionThere are certain groups of adolescents with poor cancer awareness. Cancer messages need to be targeted and tailored to particular groups to prevent the emergence of health inequalities in adulthood. Interventions to raise adolescents’ cancer awareness have the potential for a life-long impact on encouraging early diagnosis and survival.

This study adds to the body of literature exploring how to enhance supportive care for cancer survivors by reflecting on biographical disruption and continuity, and the complexities within individual constructions of changes in life that they attribute to cancer. Cancer survivors should be given opportunities to articulate the impact of cancer, thus giving legitimate space to talk about cancer's ongoing resonance on life so that problems and difficulties are not dismissed or trivialised.

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This article stems from a constructionist understanding of community care, drawing on the work of Bytheway and Johnson on the social construction of community care and Heaton's Foucauldian analysis of the visibility of the informal carer. The article develops an understanding of how care is represented in contemporary social policy and what appears to be missing from such constructions. This builds on the work of Lloyd who identifies a lack of consideration of the multidimensional aspects of care in policy. The Department of Health's National Strategy for Carers is problematized, and issues of what is and is not visible in this policy are discussed in the light of research into care relationships by the authors. We argue that, while emotional labour and the relational component of informal care are highly salient in the constructed accounts of both carers and cared-for people, they are invisible in the National Strategy.