Peer-reviewed article
Breast Cancer Patients' Parenting Concerns User Personas: A Qualitative Analysis.
Zhang Y, Liu M, Fan X, Tu H, Wang Y et al. ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This qualitative study examines parenting concerns among young Chinese women diagnosed with breast cancer. The research identifies four distinct personas of parenting concerns based on role expectations, workload, resources, and coping strategies. The study aims to help clinicians provide better-tailored support to cancer patients who are parents.
Key points
- Study recruited 17 Chinese breast cancer patients with minor children
- Identified four parenting concern personas: role overload, role strain, role resilience, and role disablement
- Four personas differ in maternal role expectations, treatment burden, family support, and coping strategies
- Unresolved parenting concerns can impair mental health and treatment adherence in cancer patients
- Findings intended to support development of stratified supportive care approaches
Limitations
This study focuses on adult women's mental health and oncological outcomes rather than child well-being outcomes. The research does not measure impacts on children's health, development, protection, or participation.
Abstract
Breast cancer disproportionately affects young women raising minor children. Unresolved parenting concerns can impair patients mental health, reduce treatment adherence, and compromise long-term oncological outcomes. However, previous studies have paid limited attention to the heterogeneity of parenting concerns in this population and lack a theory-grounded classification framework for stratified supportive care. This descriptive qualitative study, framed by social role theory, recruited 17 Chinese breast cancer patients through maximum variation sampling and conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews. From four dimensions-role expectation, role load, role resources, and role adaptation-the study extracted four distinct parenting concern personas: role overload, role strain, role resilience, and role disablement. The four subgroups differed significantly in maternal role expectations, treatment-related physical burden, family support resources, and coping strategies. These findings can assist clinicians in identifying the specific types of distress faced by different patient subgroups, thereby providing a basis for developing stratified and individualized precision support strategies.