Parental Experiences of Adult Child Death from Cancer
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Although parents experience the death of adult children diagnosed with cancer, most of the literature on adult child death has examined the issues of violent death or suicide. Where death from cancer has been studied, the focus has been mainly on psychological outcomes. Little is known about parents' experiences with this phenomenon. OBJECTIVE: To understand parents' experience of having an adult child die from cancer. DESIGN: Descriptive-exploratory study utilizing semistructured interviews with parents of 10 adult children who had died of cancer. SETTING: Parents who had lost a child to cancer were interviewed in their own home or in the interviewer's office. ANALYSIS: Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Latent content analysis and constant comparison techniques were used to develop coding labels, which were then classified into categories and subcategories. RESULTS: Parents experienced a tension between their strong desire to "parent" their child, and their recognition that their child was an autonomous adult, sometimes with a spouse and family who took precedence over them. Parents of a dying child felt helpless, and sometimes were excluded/unacknowledged by health care professionals. To cope, they reconfigured their parent role using various strategies. After the death of their child further reconfiguring takes place, including preserving memories of the child, and talking about him/her. Continuing family and social relationships influence this stage. CONCLUSION: The conflict of wishing to "parent" a dying adult child while recognizing the child's autonomy creates uncertainty for parents at an already stressful time. Facilitating parent-child communication during the illness is important. After the death of the adult child parents may continue to face difficulty with their perceived role in society (parent and/or bereaved person), and sometimes within their family. Health care professionals should make greater efforts to include the parents of the dying adult in the circle of care. The bereavement experience of these parents is intense and long-lasting. Further research is needed regarding the ways in which health care providers can best assist parents to successfully integrate this profound loss.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".