Home > HCAS > HCAS_PUBS > HCAS_JOURNALS > TQR Home > TQR > Vol. 24 > No. 1 (2019)
Article Title
Cancer Blog Narratives: The Experience of Under-Fifty Women with Breast Cancer during Different Times after Diagnosis
Abstract
The recent literature shows an increase of breast cancer in women under 50, however still few are the studies which analyse the impact of the disease in this specific target age. This study aims at exploring the most prevalent topics in Italian cancer blogs of women who have received a breast cancer diagnosis before the age of 50, in order to understand their experience of illness and the characteristics of women’s narrations at different times after diagnosis (1 year, 2 years, 3 years). We collected the textual corpus of 4 Italian breast cancer blogs and performed a thematic analysis. Five themes resulted, which, after interpretation using factorial mapping, fall into 3 sense vectors: toward the thought of the experience; from the external to the internal world; breast cancer: from rigidity to mobility. The blog analysis allows to build a first step of the scientific knowledge about the traumatic specificity of this experience, showing a need for processing the emotions. This allows to think about clinical support practices tailored to this group, in order to develop a diachronic processing of the experience and the construction of a new continuity of life.
Keywords
Breast Cancer, Younger Women, Cancer Blog, Narrative, Trauma Experience
Acknowledgements
Funding: This research was carried out in the frame of Programme STAR, financially supported by UniNA and Compagnia di San Paolo.
Publication Date
1-27-2019
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
DOI
10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3646
Recommended APA Citation
Martino, M., Gargiulo, A., Lemmo, D., & Margherita, G. (2019). Cancer Blog Narratives: The Experience of Under-Fifty Women with Breast Cancer during Different Times after Diagnosis. The Qualitative Report, 24(1), 158-173. https://doi.org/10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3646
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