The Relationships Among Coping Strategies, Religious Coping, and Spirituality in African American Women With Breast Cancer Receiving Chemotherapy

摘要

African American (AA) women have the second highest incidence of breast cancer (119.9 per 100,000) and the highest death rate from the disease (32 per 100,000) in the United States (National Cancer Institute [NCI], 2012). Those facts emphasize the importance of AA women as a large and at-risk subpopula-tion of patients with breast cancer. A growing body of literature demonstrates differences in the way AA women cope with breast cancer (Gallia & Pines, 2009; Gibson & Parker, 2003; Hamilton, Powe, Pollard, Lee, & Felton, 2007; Holt et al., 2009; Leak, Hu, & King, 2008; Levine, Yoo, Aviv, Ewing, & Au, 2007; Morgan, Gaston-Johansson, & Mock, 2006; Simon, Crowther, & Higgerson, 2007), but few coping interventions have been developed to assist this population (Chung, Cimprich, Janz, & Mills-Wiseneski, 2009; Mishel et al., 2005; Tate, 2011; Taylor et al., 2003). One major difference lies in the areas of spirituality and religious coping, where AA women report greater interest in incorporating these aspects in their repertoire of coping strategies. Evaluating coping and aspects of spiritual well-being among AA women living with breast cancer is needed to provide specific research-based information that can be incorporated into an already-developed and tested comprehensive coping strategy program (CCSP) (Gaston-Johansson et al., 2012; Gaston-Johansson, Ohly, Fall-Dickson, Nanda, & Kennedy, 1999) to make it specifically tailored for AA women (CCSP-AA) with breast cancer. The overall goal of this pilot project was to describe psychological distress, coping strategies (e.g., religious coping), coping capacity, and spiritual well-being among AAs receiving chemotherapy. The study builds on prior research regarding the testing of a comprehensive coping strategy intervention that included few AA women with breast cancer, and neither coping capacity nor spirituality was examined.