A Substantive Theory of Keeping the Spirit Alive: The Spirit Within Children With Cancer and Their Families
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite increasing survivorship, childhood cancer is nonetheless still a very traumatic phenomenon. Children and families must confront many new stressors and challenges. Understanding what families experience is essential if pediatric oncology nurses hope to provide sensitive and comprehensive care. To help discover meaningful descriptions and interpretations of families' experiences with childhood cancer, process-oriented qualitative research needs to be undertaken. A longitudinal qualitative study guided by the philosophy of interpretive interactionism was conducted to arrive at an understanding of childhood cancer from the children's and families' perspectives. A theoretical purposive sample of 39 families residing in western Canada participated. Children (4(1/2)-to-18 years of age) with a variety of cancer diagnoses and their families (parents and siblings) participated. Data collection methods included formal and informal interviewing and participant observation. Data were analyzed by the constant comparative method of grounded theory and analysis of illness narratives. Although the original intent of this study was to focus on the children's cancer symptoms, the children and families could not easily separate their cancer symptom experiences from the whole cancer experience and all its associated "rough spots." They first needed to talk about the overall cancer experience, which led to the development of the study's first substantive theory--Keeping the Spirit Alive: The Spirit Within. This substantive theory provided an understanding of how children and families used the process of keeping the spirit alive in response to them having to experience the phenomenon of the cancer: "getting through all the rough spots." Description of this theory is the focus of this article. Ways that nurses can assist children and families in maintaining a sense of spirit are presented.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".