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This study used qualitative methods to elicit the thoughts and attitudes of patients with advanced cancer. Our two interrelated aims were to explore how participants experience and apply meaning; and to consider whether this experience can be understood within an integrated framework of assumptive world (AW), sense of coherence (SOC) and meaning-based coping (MBC). Using semi-structured interviews, 26 conversations were held overall with 10 participants. Transcriptions were analysed for themes of lived-experience and for evidence of the principal elements of AW, SOC, and MBC. Findings suggest three interrelated domains that form an adaptive pathway towards coherence and sense of self. While this pathway is essentially linear it is also responsive to the ongoing stressful nature of advanced cancer.

Partners of women with breast cancer are intimately affected by their disease. This study describes the lived experience of the significant others of women with early stage breast cancer at the point of their partners' completion of adjuvant therapies. Significant others describe their need to adapt to the fear of losing their partner, the impact on their own mortality and their new role of caregiver for which they were unprepared. The greatest divergence between patient and partner was at the point of treatment completion. Whereas the women were continuing to experience difficulties at this time, their significant others were focused on 'getting back to normal.' There is a need to increase our understanding of the psychosocial needs of primary carers in order to better support them, as integral members of the care team.