| dc.description.abstract | Sixty cancer patients who had completed their course of
treatment were contacted prior to a scheduled follow-up
appointment at the Thunder Bay Regional Cancer Centre.
Subjects completed four questionnaires (Daily Stress
Inventory, Ways of Coping, Desirability of Control,
Multidimensional Health Locus of Control), two brief
scales (Hope and Dread), and were interviewed
individually on the day of the follow-up appointment.
The structured interview included questions concerning
appointment-induced stress, individual coping
strategies, personal beliefs concerning health,
existing support systems, and opinions regarding the
Cancer Centre. Follow-up visits may be very stressful
life events for cancer patients. For some the visit
may be anticipated with hopeful expectancy, while for
others it may be a dreaded experience, and the
individual's coping style plays a large part in
determining how stressful the visit may be. This study
assessed patients' use of emotion-focused and problemfocused
coping strategies, the degree of personal
control generally deemed desirable by the individual in
a variety of situations, the belief concerning the
degree of control specific to their personal health,
and related these factors to the amount of stress reported daily for a fourteen-day period prior to the
visit. It was hypothesized that: (1) patients more
inclined to use emotion-focused coping, as opposed to
problem-focused coping, would experience lower levels
of stress, and that (2) patients who reported a higher
desirability for control in general, yet believed they
had little control over their health, would cope least
effectively and would experience higher levels of
stress than their counterparts. The findings indicated
that patients did not consider the follow-up
appointment to be unusually stressful and that both
emotion-focused and problem-focused coping positively
correlated with stress, although problem-focused coping
was the best predictor of daily stress. The
interaction between desire for control and belief in
health control in mitigating stress is worthy of
further investigation. Implications for the care of
cancer patients are discussed. | |
