Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Barton, Michelle

Area of Concentration

Psychology

Abstract

The current study aimed to determine the interaction between cultural background, perceptions of illness, and family management in Chinese American and White American caregivers of children diagnosed with cancer. The current study was conducted to gain knowledge on how families from different backgrounds respond to the devastating experience of having a child diagnosed with cancer. To achieve this goal, participants were recruited through online communities focused on pediatric cancer and traditional Chinese medicine. A 135-item online survey containing the revised Illness Perceptions Questionnaire (Moss-Morris et al., 2002) and the Family Management Measure (Knafl et al., 2011) was distributed to participants to gather their responses. The small sample size of the current study (N=4) and the lack of Chinese American participants resulted in an inability to fully answer the proposed research questions. However, meaningful insights were still able to be drawn from the descriptive data. Perceptions of illness and family management behaviors do appear to be linked. Future research should seek to achieve a larger and more culturally diverse sample to confirm the findings present in the current study.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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