Assessing the Benefit of Dignity Therapy for Adolescents with Advanced Cancer: A Prospective Explorative Mixed-method Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aims: One of the most difficult challenges faced by end-of-life care providers is helping patients achieve or maintain a sense of dignity. Preliminary evaluation studies of Dignity Therapy have been carried out with adult patients with advanced cancer in Canada and Australia and they have produced positive results. However, no studies have yet addressed younger cancer populations or the appropriateness of the technique for use with children. An initial study is therefore proposed, that would aim to evaluate the potential benefit of dignity therapy for adolecents with advanced cancer. \nMethods: A small scale open-label RCT comprising two groups: \n(i) Intervention (Dignity Therapy offered in addition to standard care), and \n(ii) Control group (standard care) is proposed. \nIt is also suggested that qualitative interviews be conducted with participants and family members shortly after intervention. Family members will also be asked to reflect on the benefits of the therapy three months after bereavement. Alongside the main study it is proposed that there will be user group involvement in the design and execution of the research. \nResults: The findings of my research to date are suggestive that children have similar responses and worries about death and dying to adult populations, but they struggle to decide who to verbalise these worries to. Currently, there is no shared intervention for this purpose with children. \nConclusions: As signified by my allied research findings, there is an element of mutual protectiveness and a truth-telling hesitance complicated in the dyadic relationship of parent and child. In this respect, dignity therapy would be a very worthwhile intervention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".