Do all roads lead to Rome? An ideal-type study on trajectories of resilience in advanced cancer caregiving

TL;DR

This study explores how partners of people with advanced cancer cope, identifying six distinct resilience and distress patterns over time.

Contribution

The study introduces six distinct trajectories of resilience and distress in caregiving for advanced cancer, using ideal-type analysis.

Findings

Six distinct trajectories of resilience and distress were identified in partners of advanced cancer patients.

Resilience trajectories include rapidly adapting, gradually adapting, and slowly adapting resilience.

Less optimal adjustment patterns include continuing distress, delayed distress, and frozen disconnection.

Abstract

Studies on resilience in advanced cancer caregiving typically focus on the interplay between resilience-promoting resources and coping strategies that may be associated with resilience. However, no studies have investigated the emergence of trajectories of resilience and distress in individuals confronted with a cancer diagnosis of a loved one.

Ideal-type analysis, a method for constructing typologies from qualitative data, was used to identify trajectories involving resilience or the lack thereof based on fifty-four interviews conducted with seventeen partners of patients recently diagnosed with advanced cancer over a period of three years.

Six trajectories could be distinguished, three of which involved resilience (rapidly adapting resilience, gradually adapting resilience, and slowly adapting resilience), while the other three trajectories (continuing distress, delayed distress, and frozen disconnection) reflected a less optimal adjustment. These different trajectories seemed to be rooted in the individual characteristics of partners, the behavior of a support network, and interactions between the two.

The differentiation between these trajectories in partners of patients diagnosed with cancer not only furthers research on resilience in the face of adversity, but also promises to assist healthcare professionals in optimizing support for this often-neglected group of partners of patients diagnosed with cancer.

Figures