Dignity Amidst Liminality: Healing Within Suffering Among Chinese Terminal Cancer Patients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study critically examines the concepts of dignity and liminality at the end-of life, in an effort to better understand the processes of healing within suffering among Chinese terminal cancer patients receiving palliative care services in Hong Kong. Meaning-oriented interviews were conducted with 18 Chinese terminal patients, aged 44 to 98, to elicit the narratives and stories of their illness experience. All interviews were analyzed using grounded theory and supplemented by ethnographic observations and field notes. Two major themes and eight subprocesses of healing adopted by patients to achieve and maintain dignity were identified: (a) personal autonomy, which encompasses the need to (i) regain control over living environments, (ii) maintain self-sufficiency despite institutional care, (ii) make informed care decisions to reduce sense of burden, and (iv) engage in future planning to create a lasting legacy; and (b) family connectedness, which encompasses the need to (i) maintain close ties with family members to express appreciation, (ii) achieve reconciliation, (iii) fulfill family obligations, and (iv) establish a continuing bond that transcends generations. Implications of these themes for advanced care planning and life review interventions were discussed with the goal of enhancing patient autonomy and family connectedness, and thereby providing structure and meaning for Chinese terminal patients and their families at the end of life.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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".