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This chapter focuses on the differences that younger, middle-aged, and older women with breast cancer experience, particularly in health knowledge and treatment. These differential experiences, in part, stem from our youth oriented culture. This ideology extends into medicine and can affect day-to-day medical practice. Differential experiences are, therefore, likely to result in inequality and disparity in health and in healthcare. It is argued that older women are less empowered than their younger counterparts to display the same degree of agency. This analysis has important implications for health care professionals in the treatment of older women with breast cancer.

The sequence of stress, distress and somatization has occupied much of the late twentieth-century psychological research. The anatomy of stress can be viewed from interactional and hybrid theories that suggest that the individual relates with the surroundings by buffering the harmful effects of stressors. These acts or reactions are called coping strategies and are designed as protection from the stressors and adaptation to them. Failure to successfully adapt to stressors results in psychological distress. In some individuals, elevated levels of distress and failed coping are expressed in physical symptoms, rather than through feelings, words, or actions. Such “somatization” defends against the awareness of the psychological distress, as demonstrated in the psychosocial literature. The progression of behavior resulting from somatic distress moves from a private domain into the public arena, involving an elaborate medicalization process, is however less clear in sociological discourse. The invocation of a medical diagnosis to communicate physical discomfort by way of repeated use of health care services poses a major medical, social and economic problem. The goal of this paper is to clarify this connection by investigating the relevant literature in the area of women with breast cancer. This manuscript focuses on the relationship of psychological stress, the stress response of distress, and the preoccupation with one’s body, and proposes a new theoretical construct.

To examine the lived experiences of the biological adult daughters of women with breast cancer.

Family systems theory and phenomenology were used to guide this exploratory, qualitative study. Qualitative data were collected via one-time, semi-structured interviews with adult daughters of women with breast cancer.

Predominant themes included: close mother–daughter relationships, untimely disclosure of information, attentive fathers, optimistic outlooks, and influences on participants’ intimate relationships. Perceived strong familial and intimate relationships prior to breast cancer diagnosis helped ensure that mother–daughter relationships would remain strong, or even improve. Fathers’ attentiveness to mothers was pivotal in determining positive and negative attributes in daughters’ own intimate relationships.

Based on the findings from this study, family scientists and healthcare professionals may have a better understanding of the patients’ young adult daughters’ concerns throughout breast cancer treatment and follow up.

Daughters may be at a loss when their mothers are diagnosed with breast cancer. Healthcare professionals can be equipped to recognize these signs when meeting with patients and families, offer suggestions for family members’ coping, and encourage daughters to consider their own breast cancer risk and screening.

This study will provide a new insight into the experiences of daughters of women with breast cancer, and help family and health professionals understand how to support the relatives of breast cancer patients.

Purpose – The goal of this chapter is to understand the role of nonprofit voluntary health organizations (VHOs) in the lives of Canadian women coping with breast cancer.

Methodology – Through qualitative interviews with breast cancer survivors and records of VHOs active in this field, we assess the level and nature of their interactions and impact on women's quality of life.

Findings – Our findings suggest that at the micro-level, VHOs are venues for women to receive auxiliary services such as information, counseling, and support that complement the mainstream health care provision. While VHO services empower women as health care consumers, we show that they also serve as venues for women to reciprocate by volunteering. This process of reciprocity helps women cope with their own healing and allows them to be not only consumers but also producers of health services.

Research limitations – The non-random nature and the small sample size make our findings not easily generalizable to the larger population of breast cancer survivors; rather they are indicative of the experiences of Canadian women in one large urban metropolitan area.

Value of the chapter – We demonstrate the role of VHOs as venues of health consumerism as well as places for consumers to become involved in the production of services by volunteering.

This chapter explores the relationships between 12 single mothers with breast cancer and their children, a subtheme of a larger qualitative study.

Qualitative data were collected via interviews. The study used the ecological systems theoretical framework to explain findings.

In speaking with women about how they constructed and altered their social networks post-diagnosis, many talked about their relationships with their children. This chapter explains how these mothers discussed their diagnoses with their children in age-appropriate ways; how they relied on their children during treatment for informational and emotional support; and how relationships with their children changed during treatment and recovery.

Based on findings from this study, family scientists, public health professionals, and oncology care providers may have a better understanding of the specific concerns and experiences related to the children of breast cancer patients without partners.

This study yields new information about the support needs of single breast cancer patients and their children, and offers insight into what researchers and medical teams can do to better support families affected by breast cancer.

This paper examines the use of “double breasting” as a means of union avoidance among multinational companies (MNCs). Double breasting refers to the practice whereby multi-establishment organizations simultaneously operate establishments on both union and non-union bases. Using survey data from the largest and most representative empirical investigation of employment practice in MNCs in Ireland, supplemented by qualitative data gathered from case-based investigations in the subsidiary operations of American-owned MNCs, we profile the incidence and pattern of this particular form of union avoidance as well as providing insights on management's rationale for so doing. Our findings suggest that a substantial and increasing number of unionized MNCs in Ireland are engaging in double breasting. This phenomenon is most evident among U.S. MNCs. We also find that employers, at both local and global levels, have proactively initiated double breasting as a strategic ploy to increase management prerogative and better position subsidiary operations to attract new investment from corporate levels.

Health social movements address several issues: (a) access to, or provision of, health care services; (b) disease, illness experience, disability and contested illness; and/or (c) health inequality and inequity based on race, ethnicity, gender, class and/or sexuality. These movements have challenged a variety of authority structures in society, resulting in massive changes in the health care system. While many other social movements challenge medical authority, a rapidly growing type of health social movement, “embodied health movements” (EHMs), challenge both medical and scientific authority. Embodied health movements do this in three ways: (1) they make the body central to social movements, especially with regard to the embodied experience of people with the disease; (2) they typically include challenges to existing medical/scientific knowledge and practice; and (3) they often involve activists collaborating with scientists and health professionals in pursuing treatment, prevention, research, and expanded funding. We present a conceptual framework for understanding embodied health movements as simultaneously challenging authority structures and allying with them, and offer the environmental breast cancer movement as an exemplar case.

Purpose – This chapter examines medical consumerism and the changing relations between patients as consumers and the medical system across two women's health contexts, breast cancer and infertility.

Methodology/approach – The analysis draws on two qualitative studies: The first explores the experiences of 60 breast cancer survivors through in-depth interviews and participant observation (Sulik, 2005), and the second uses in-depth interviews to analyze 18 women's experiences with infertility (Eich-Krohm, 2000).

Findings – The medical consumer is an individualized role that shifts attention away from the quality problem in health care and toward the quality of the person as a medical consumer who is characterized to be optimistic, proactive, rational, responsible, and informed.

Research limitations/implications – As medicine has become a form of mass consumption, the category of medical consumer has elevated the individual in medical decision-making. The shift from patient to medical consumer is an ongoing process that is grounded in a tension between medical control and individual agency, and is exacerbated by the intensity and incomprehensibility of modern medicine.

Practical implications – The proliferation of medical information and personal illness narratives through the Internet, advice books, and self-help groups have advanced lay knowledge about preventive medicine and medical treatment while simultaneously introducing new fears and anxiety about the multitude of options and outcomes.

Originality/value of chapter – This study contributes to our knowledge on medical consumerism and its impact on illness experience and the synthesis of lay and professional knowledge.

Purpose: This study examines the experiences and struggles of young women with breast cancer as they navigate the intersectionality of their illness and gender identity. Specifically, the research explores the construction and expression of gender identity as a core part of who they were prior to diagnosis and who they desire to be in the future.

Design and methodology: A phenomenological approach was used to investigate how women with breast cancer experience changes related to gender identity. Eighteen in-depth interviews were conducted with young women who have been diagnosed within the last five years.

Findings: Young women undergo gender identity disruptions and shifts as the result of breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. Informants expressed feelings that their resultant identities do not conform to cultural normative representations of gender, which profoundly impact their perceptions of the physical self, gender roles, and intimate relationships. At this acute stage, they struggled with the loss of important body markers of femininity (breasts, hair, etc.) and attempted through consumption to find alternative ways to enact gender expressions.

Originality and value: This research explores consumer experiences when bodies do not conform to idealized body images and cultural representations of gender. Informants revealed a complex portrait of women who experience the early, invasive stages of illness and body transformation.

Ethnographic interviews are often favoured when examining sensitive issues, such as patients' accounts of their illness experiences. This type of interview enables the researcher to get a deeper (some would argue possibly better) understanding of the experiences that interviewees are recounting, relying on the interviewee to drive the focus of the conversation rather than the researcher determining what is discussed and shared.