A gap around gynecologic cancer, and a survey that did not intervene

The summary follows a 2023 paper by Ahn Hee-nam and Kim Jeong-hye, published in Asian Oncology Nursing. Women with a gynecologic cancer, the authors say, meet physical, psychological, and social difficulty through diagnosis and treatment. After surgery and chemotherapy there may be a lowered sense of the body and of self-worth, broken sleep, and a fear that the illness will return. That leaves a person under considerable strain, and it is worth asking how she copes and how she grows. Post-traumatic growth in cancer care is treated as important, yet a good deal of earlier work, the paper says, had centred on breast cancer. Growth after a gynecologic cancer, on this account, cannot be explained by inner effort alone; it has to be read with cancer coping and with family support. The family is taken as a central resource for adapting to treatment and easing strain. Knowing how the three sit together, the authors argue, can ground nursing work that helps a positive adaptation.

The design is a descriptive correlational survey, not a trial. No programme was applied and compared; women were asked, at one time, how they actually felt about coping, about family support, and about growth. The work was done on a gynecologic ward of hospital A, a tertiary general hospital in Seoul, among inpatients receiving chemotherapy. The aim was explained first; only those who agreed took a questionnaire, which they generally filled in themselves, and they were told they could withdraw at any point in the study period. The form covered ordinary background, illness and treatment, and the three main measures.

One hundred and fourteen questionnaires, from a 2022 summer and autumn in Seoul

The sample was women aged 20 or over who understood the study and agreed to join. One hundred and fourteen questionnaires were given out; all were returned, none were too thin to use, and all 114 entered the analysis. To check the size, the authors used G*Power 3.1.9.2. For a correlation, with an effect size of 0.3, a significance level of 0.05, and a power of 0.95, the minimum came out at 109, so 114 was treated as enough. Data were collected from 25 June to 8 October 2022. If a woman could not fill the form herself, the researcher read the items and recorded her answers. Analysis was done in SPSS Statistics 28.0: frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations first, then differences by background and by illness, and Pearson’s correlation among the three main measures.

Cancer coping, as defined here, is the cognitive and behavioural work a patient uses — inwardly, or with other people — to adapt to the strain of diagnosis and treatment. Reliabilities at the development of the scale are given as Cronbach’s alpha of .87 for intra-personal coping and .82 for inter-personal coping; the summary does not name the scale’s first author, and no name is added here. Family support was measured with Cobb’s 1976 instrument, revised into Korean by Kang in 1984, with alphas at development of .86 in Cobb and .89 in Kang. Post-traumatic growth is the positive psychological change a person perceives after the traumatic experience of diagnosis and treatment, measured with Tedeschi and Calhoun’s 1996 Posttraumatic Growth Inventory, adapted for people with cancer by Jung and Park in 2017, with alphas of .90 and .94 at those developments. Ordinary background ran to seven items, illness and treatment to eight; those questions have no scale reliability, as they are not a developed instrument. In this sample the authors report alphas of .93 for cancer coping (.90 and .92 for the two parts), .92 for family support, and .95 for growth.

Family support ran higher than growth, and growth rose most with inward coping

Mean cancer coping was 62.65, with a standard deviation of 13.53. Intra-personal coping averaged 38.32, inter-personal 24.32. Family support averaged 49.06, and post-traumatic growth 59.66. The authors read family support as relatively high, growth as relatively low, and coping as mid-to-higher. Differences also appeared. Married women scored higher on coping, family support, and growth. Living with family went with higher coping. A monthly family income of 3 million won or more, as recorded in that 2022 survey, went with higher coping and growth than an income under 2 million won. Family support was higher in the group one to two years after diagnosis than in the group five years or more after, and higher when there had been no recurrence than when there had. Growth was higher when the ECOG activity level was 0 than when it was 2 or 3. Those figures stay with the 2022 sample and the 2023 paper; they are not recast as a later official total.

The correlations with growth were all positive and significant. The strongest was with intra-personal coping, r=.80, p<.001. Inter-personal coping was r=.61, p<.001, and family support r=.42, p<.001. In short, the higher the coping and the family support, the higher the growth. The authors therefore say that, to raise growth among women receiving chemotherapy for a gynecologic cancer, nursing work should help a patient cope with the hard stretch of treatment, and should strengthen family support.

The student writing the summary adds a thought of her own: cancers of the uterus, the ovary, and the cervix touch sites that carry a particular meaning for a woman, so treatment can bring not only physical pain but a drop in self-worth, anxiety, a sense of loss, and fear. The finding she takes away is the same as the paper’s: coping and family support rose together with growth, and inward coping was the closest companion of the three. The same Korean summary, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A class summary of Ahn Hee-nam and Kim Jeong-hye, “Cancer Coping, Family Support, and Post-traumatic Growth in Patients with Gynecological Cancer,” Asian Oncology Nursing, 2023.
2. A descriptive correlational survey of 114 inpatients receiving chemotherapy on a gynecologic ward of hospital A, a tertiary general hospital in Seoul, 25 June to 8 October 2022, analysed in SPSS 28.0, with a G*Power minimum of 109.
3. Measures as the summary gives them: a cancer-coping scale with intra- and inter-personal parts; Cobb’s 1976 family-support instrument as revised by Kang in 1984; Tedeschi and Calhoun’s 1996 Posttraumatic Growth Inventory as adapted for cancer patients by Jung and Park in 2017.
4. Selected findings as reported: mean coping 62.65, family support 49.06, growth 59.66; correlations of growth with intra-personal coping r=.80, inter-personal coping r=.61, and family support r=.42, all p<.001.

Last updated: 14 November 2026