Adaptation to Cancer in the Context of Spirituality

Abstract

The study is focused on the selection of coping strategies and their relationship with the meaning of religion and spirituality in cancer survivors. The individual coping strategies were measured using the Mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer questionnaire (Mini-MAC; Watson et al. 1994), and spirituality was measured using the Centrality of Religiosity Scale (CRS-5; Huber and Huber 2012). In total 126 people participated in the study, out of whom 100 were female. The average age of the participants was 64 years (SD = 8.74). The results showed that the use of strategies such as helplessness/hopelessness and anxious preoccupation correlated negatively with public as well as private practice of spirituality. Cancer survivors with ideological, intellectual spiritual experience and with the experience of faith use adaptive coping strategies, namely fighting spirit and fatalism.

Keywords

• coping strategies
• cancer survivors
• trauma
• spirituality