Center for Women´s Health and Wellness
Current Research: Understanding Cancer Metaphors
With funding from the Center for Women´s Health and Wellness, and in collaboration with Moses Cone Regional Cancer Center, Dr. Sharon Bracci, Department of Communications, is examining how the use of cancer metaphors helps or hinders patients in their efforts to make sense of their experience and give meaning to it.
Cancer metaphors are the words and phrases that people use to describe what it is like to experience the diagnosis, treatment, and survivor phases on cancer. Dr. Bracci hypothesizes that her study´s results will "affirm a complex set of metaphoric language to help patients who have cancer. Ppreliminary research into this literature suggests that patients respond to very different metaphors and choose a variety of metaphors to describe their experience and themselves during treatment and remission."
Her project involves a one-year qualitative study of cancer metaphors gathered from open-ended written questionnaires by volunteers in support groups at the Moses Cone Health System Regional Cancer Center.