Pini, S, Gardner, P orcid.org/0000-0002-8799-0443 and Hugh-Jones, S orcid.org/0000-0002-5307-1203 (2019) How and Why School Is Important to Teenagers with Cancer: Outcomes from a Photo-Elicitation Study. Journal of adolescent and young adult oncology, 8 (2). ISSN 2156-5333
Abstract
BACKGROUND:Being diagnosed with cancer during the teenage years can be significant given that young people are at a key developmental, educational, and future-planning stage. Little is known about young people's attitude toward and engagement with school postdiagnosis, nor how this changes over time. We adopted a novel qualitative approach to examine accounts over time of young people recently diagnosed with cancer. METHODS:Twelve teenagers (13-16 years), recently diagnosed with cancer, participated in photo-elicitation interviews at three time points (∼2, 6, and 9 months postdiagnosis), generating 30 interviews in total. Photo-elicitation interviews center around images that participants bring to represent key experiences and issues that matter to them. Transcripts were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. RESULTS:Seven themes were generated, representing experiences over time. Themes convey how significant school was to the young people postdiagnosis, principally because it mattered to them to maintain a normative educational pathway. Young people felt tension between wanting to be the same as their peers but feeling distinctly changed. Keeping ownership and control of their cancer story within school was challenging. Survivorship brought, for some, a legacy of missed schooling. CONCLUSION:Support for young people and reintegration plans for school need to be tailored to the young person's emerging way of understanding their cancer and recovery, and their orientation to coping. Young people need help to understand that schoolwork exemptions/extensions do not implicate academic deficiency, and how they could accept a "same but different" position as they continue to develop personally and educationally with their peers.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | Copyright 2019, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Journal of adolescent and young adult oncology . Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Keywords: | School; education; psychosocial; quality of life; peers; friends; time; adjustment; treatment; qualitative; photo elicitation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Psychology (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 29 May 2019 14:23 |
Last Modified: | 06 Oct 2019 00:38 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Mary Ann Liebert |
Identification Number: | 10.1089/jayao.2018.0068 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:146568 |