Social Interactions and Cultural Repertoires as Resources for Coping With Breast Cancer

Abstract

The article aims to better understand the role of cultural and social resources for coping with cancer as a disruptive experience. Fourteen women who had recently received a diagnosis of breast cancer and started a treatment in an Italian hospital have been interviewed individually to elicit narratives regarding the interactions with the other patients. The analysis focused on the role played by social interactions and cultural repertoires as devices for making sense of and facing the illness. Results show that patients use both interactive as well as noninteractive strategies. In both cases, however, the other patients are an important reference in the interviewees' accounts. Even for noninteracting patients, the others and specific groups are taken into account and displayed in their narratives either directly or indirectly (i.e., typified or imagined), contributing to interpret and address what they experienced as cancer patients. Moreover, results provide empirical evidence of the various cultural repertoires (including examples retraceable to popular culture) on which people rely to address and cope with the illness. These results widen the individualistic framework commonly used in the understanding of coping strategies by including psychosocial phenomena that are created outside the individual in the complex interactions with the social and cultural world.

Social support for breast cancer patients in the occupied Palestinian territory

“…The family also plays a key role in obtaining informational support, by mediating communication with doctors. Contact with breast cancer patients and survivors is an additional source of supporting information, with however a possible negative impact in terms of emotional coping [17]. Interviewees such as L. deliberately avoided interactions with other patients as a way to protect themselves from making parallels that might harm their hope and psychological well-being.…”

“…Al-Azri et al [10] documented that in lower-income countries women with breast cancer are at an increased risk of physical and psychological morbidities after diagnosis, such as distress, anxiety, depression and concerns relating to children and family burden, body image and sexual and marital relations [11,12]. However, social barriers and the false beliefs about cancer and its association with death for many society members affect a patient's daily life even by avoiding mentioning its name or talking about topics related to the disease [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. In addition, several studies have showed that in the Arab and Palestinian society, a powerful social stigma is still attached to cancer [13,22,23].…”

‘We will take care of you’: Identity categorisation markers in intercultural medical encounters

“…Such shared knowledge may not be taken for granted in conversational exchanges wherein participants come from different cultural or linguistic background, as in interactions between ethnically-discordant participants (Penner et al, 2013). Studies on intercultural healthcare settings report general difficulties in communication and mutual understanding between doctors and non-native patients, bearing short-and long-term negative effects on the therapeutic outcomes (Zucchermaglio and Alby, 2017;Almuhtaseb et al, 2020;Dovidio et al, 2016;Maina et al, 2018).…”

Existential Meaning-Making Coping in Iran: A Qualitative Study among Patients with Cancer

“…Cultural contexts in which individuals are socialized affect the ways they choose or adhere to different coping strategies. Several studies have demonstrated the role of cultural repertoires in the choice of coping strategies to face a difficult crisis such as being struck by cancer (e.g., Kayser et al 2014;Zucchermaglio and Alby 2017).…”