SOCIAL SUPPORT, SOCIAL NETWORKS AND COPING OF PARENTS OF CHILDREN WITH CANCER: COMPARING WHITE AND AFRICAN-AMERICAN PARENTS.
Contributors: University of Florida.
Published: 1995
Number of pages: 391
Subjects: Anthropology, Cultural.; Health Sciences, Nursing.; Sociology, Individual and Family Studies.; Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies.
Description: Having a child diagnosed with cancer is an overwhelming experience for parents. The goal of this research was to understand why some parents do better with this situation than do others. Research questions included the following: Who provides support to the parents? What is provided? What do parents do to cope? In addition, this research compared white parents to African American parents in an effort to explicate racial and cultural differences in experiencing childhood cancer.

Two hundred two parents (150 white and 52 African American) of children with cancer were interviewed in a hospital or clinic setting in three southeastern US cities. In addition, several standardized psychological instruments were used to measure anxiety, depression, somatization, and general level of psychological symptomatology. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed on the data.

This was a story of courage and of incredible human caring for others in distress. Overall, there were few significant differences by race, gender, or site. These parents had multiple sources of support. White parents had larger social networks, but African Americans perceived receiving more support from their network alters. Networks were small, dense, kin-centered social networks of long duration, with members living near to one another. Emic definitions of support differed by race, with whites defining support in emotional terms and African Americans defining it more broadly, both in terms of emotional and instrumental actions. Social network properties and characteristics did not significantly correlate with or predict the psychological outcomes.

Most parents used a combination of problem-focused and emotion-focused coping behaviors to deal with stressful situations. Only a small percentage of parents showed poor psychological functioning. However, use of emotion-focused coping behaviors, particularly escape-avoidance behaviors, best predicted poorer psychological outcomes. Few of the variables commonly thought to influence positive outcomes (such as social support, income) predicted the psychological variables. The experience of having a child with cancer was so encompassing that nothing else mattered, not the amount of support, or who provided it, or how much.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-11, Section: A, page: 4447.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA, 1995.

School code: 0070.