Meaning making and childhood cancer: A study of structure and agency in the narratives of Mexican, Mexican American, and Anglo-American mothers of children with cancer.

Abstract

How do mothers construct meaning around the experience of childhood cancer? For most people, cancer is a specter of death that enters without warning like a ruthless secret invasion (Sontag 1978). But when it strikes children, cancer is even more mysterious and threatening, for then it attacks the most innocent and most vulnerable members of society--those who society wants most to protect. In depth interviews were conducted with a total of fifty Mexican, Mexican-American, and Anglo-American mothers of children with cancer in two different hospital settings (in the United States and Mexico). The narratives that resulted from those interviews were then analyzed using qualitative, inductive, and thematic coding procedures. Narrative meaning was defined as sets of cognitive connections created by mothers in order to try to fit the reality of their child's diagnosis and treatment into a framework of understanding. These sets of connections clustered around problematic and/or particularly salient aspects of the experience of having a child in treatment for cancer. Discussion focuses on the ways differing sets of schemas and resources combined to create different meaning systems in the three respondent groups around issues such as cost of treatments, severity of symptoms at diagnosis, Latina self awareness, loosing sense of self, looking for causes, finding personal strength, and the community of mothers in the hospital. Not all issues were found in all three respondent groups.