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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Interruptions to cultural life scripts
— cancer diagnoses, contextual age, and life narratives | | Author(s) | Loretta L Pecchioni |
| Journal title | Research on Aging, vol 34, no 6, November 2012 |
| Pages | pp 758-780 |
| Source | www.roa.sagepub.com |
| Keywords | Cancer ; Diagnosis ; Spouses as carers ; Family relationships ; Qualitative Studies ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Serious illnesses serve as an interruption to the idealised life script, and can create a tension between this ideal and the real, lived experience. This study explores the nature of interrupted life narratives by analysing comments related to ageing made by people diagnosed with cancer and their spousal caregivers. Their comments reveal the ways in which ageing expectations, chronological age, and health are intertwined. Because a serious illness is typically expected in very old age, when it occurs at a younger age both the individual with cancer and his or her caregiver struggle to make sense of this interruption to their anticipated life narratives. Poor health status leads to age relativism, that is, perceptions that the individual is not acting his or her chronological age. For married couples, adapting to illness as a couple operates in similar ways as it does for the individual. Their identity as a couple is challenged by the illness, and they struggle to redefine their relationship to each other and to their social world. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-121102224 A |
| Classmark | CK: LK7: P6:SN: DS:SJ: 3DP: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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