Social Support Research Paper

Words: 691
Pages: 3

Does perceived support help cancer patients during their treatment?
i) Importance Cancer patients deal with emotional stress when they are diagnosed with life-threatening disease. According to World Cancer Research Fund International, the number of cancer patients is expected to reach 24 million by 2035 as cancer affect people from different ages, races, genders and social class (Worldwide data, n.d.). The emotional stress , that the cancer patients deal with, can affect their willingness of the to pursue their treatment. Consequently, finding stress reliever that works efficiently for most cancer patients would increase cancer survival rate. The current belief in the medical community is perceived support is the most efficient stress reliever.
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Consequently, the tumor’s ability to divide and grow increases by the increase of the stress level (Psychological Stress and Cancer, n.d.). They may even go for doctor shopping to find the support they need even if the new physician is less qualified than the previous one. Thus, knowing which type of perceived support benefits cancer patients during their treatment, can destress them and prevent those consequences from happening. iii) Scientific Relevance In the current literature, most of the studies about the effects of perceived social support on cancer patients focus on at most two types of support as well as they are limited by the characteristics of the sample. Thus, it is important to review this topic to understand if social support assists cancer patients during their treatments and if so, are all types of support as efficient? iv) Definitions Perceived support includes: same-gender first degree relative support , spousal support, support groups, and even physician support. The physician is the most health professional cancer patients deal with during their treatment so their support should be …show more content…
The used keywords During the search, “support”, “perceived social support”, “support groups” and “spousal support” were used as keywords because the goal of this paper to understand the effect of the different types of support. Additionally, “cancer” and “treatment” were used to limit the results of the effect of the different types of support to cancer patients during their treatment .
Results
Study One Dagan, M., Sanderman, R., Schokker, M. C., Wiggers, T., Baas, P. C., Haastert, M. V., & Hagedoorn, M. (2011). Spousal support and changes in distress over time in couples coping with cancer: The role of personal control. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(2), 310-318. doi: 10.1037/a0022887 i) Description. a) design. It was a prospective longitudinal study on newly diagnosed cancer patients with colorectal cancer and their intimate partners. b) method 70 heterosexual couples had to fill out questionnaires 3 months after diagnosis (the baseline) and 9 months after diagnosis (the follow-up) . The questionnaire measured personal control (only at the baseline), psychological distress and perceived spousal supportive and unsupportive