Relating to the Experience of Contingency in Patients With Advanced Cancer: An Interview Study in U.S. Patients

Abstract

Context. Being diagnosed with incurable cancer can be a life-changing experience, evoking different spiritual questions and needs. Confronting a serious life-threatening event occurs not only often unexpected but also can disrupt a person's selfimage and ideals of their personhood. This confrontation makes it difficult for people to integrate it into their personal life storydotherwise referred to as an experience of contingency. Objectives. Different modes of relating to the contingent life event of having cancer have been studied in a Dutch patient population. Here we present an interview study in an U.S. population with advanced cancer patients. Methods. We included eight American patients with advanced cancer from the George Washington University Cancer Center. All patients were interviewed twice discussing their life events and life goals using a semistructured interview model. All interviews were transcribed and analyzed focusing on how patients described the way they related to the experience of having advanced cancer. The constant comparative method with a directed content analysis approach was used to code the themes in the interviews. Results. The analyses show that the four modes of relating to contingency that we found in the Dutch study population can also be found in an American advanced cancer patient population. Differences were found in the extended way American patients described the fourth mode of ''receiving.'' Conclusion. This study ensures a broader and deeper understanding of relating to the experience of contingency in having incurable cancer, which is crucial in developing accurate spiritual care in the palliative phase of patients.

Editorial

“…Yvonne Weeseman, Hanneke van Laarhoven and Michael Scherer-Rath challenge these divisions. In their research on highly sensitive children they confirm the findings of Kruizinga et al (2017;2018), who distinguish between four modes of dealing with experiences of contingency, namely denying, acknowledging, accepting and receiving. They assume that immanent agnostic forms of acceptance and receiving contingency do not automatically eliminate contingency, as Wuchterl claims with his dogmatic appeal to universal autonomous reason, but rather characterise open attempts at interpretation.…”

An assisted structured reflection on life events and life goals in advanced cancer patients: Outcomes of a randomized controlled trial (Life InSight Application (LISA) study)

“…Recently, we found that although four different modes of relating to contingency that we found in a Dutch study population can also be found in an American advanced cancer patient population, differences were found in the extend by which American patients described the fourth mode of relating to contingency, that is, the “receiving” mode. 59,60 This could suggest that American patients could be more open to the intervention that we developed. Furthermore, the generalization of our results may be limited by an overrepresentation in our study population of patients who are willing to talk about their life.…”

Selecting Content Analysis Approach in Social Networking Sites: What’s the Best for Cyberbullying Studies?

“…But, this limitation can be overcome if the content analysis is applied to transcripts of interviews or focus groups (Graneheim et al, 2017). This is proven by Kruizinga et al (2018), who used directed content analysis to extend their semi-structured interview model of spiritual care with cross-cultural perspectives drawn from interviews. Ngai et al (2020) also analyzed the contents of 608 Covid-19 posts to develop an integrated framework that governments can use to engage the public regarding the pandemic.…”

“…Some characterized it as either qualitative or quantitative content analysis (Godskesen et al, 2013). Some specified the type of content analysis approach that they used (Kruizinga et al, 2018;Shafiq & Kiran, 2018). Some studies were vague in describing their content analysis steps, such as one study which stated that their content analysis is quantitative and rhetorical in different sentences, yet did not clearly distinguish them (Shafiq & Kiran, 2018) and another study which mentioned that they used content analysis for the first phase of a study and then "a more detailed content analysis" for the next phase (Mahrt & Puschmann, 2014, p.10).…”