Stable, fragile and recreated – a qualitative study of agency in everyday life with breast and prostate cancer

ABSTRACT

Purpose: This study aims to explore how agency is constructed in everyday life with cancer in relation to daily activities and habits. Agency is approached as a key element of daily life existence, and it is constructed in terms of “acting in the world”, self-behaviour, changing routines, identity expectations and life course.

Methods: The study is based on a social constructionist approach and the data of 32 participants were gathered through a public call for narratives on “everyday life with breast and prostate cancer” in Finland in 2009. The analysis was conducted by utilizing a discursive research approach and coding.

Results: Three categories of agency were identified: stable—where agency continues fluently after cancer; fragile—where the ability to take care of daily activities has deteriorated; and recreated—where living with cancer adapts or creates a new basis for daily living.

Conclusions: The findings of the study suggest that everyday life activities and habits define and (de)construct agency, and that these constructions are tightly linked to the ill person’s overall life situation, physical abilities and cultural context. Having cancer can create new challenges to agency in daily life but does not suppress agency.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• breast and prostate cancer
• daily activities and habits
• everyday life

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The written form and delivery of the narratives varied: 19 narratives were delivered by email and 13 by mail. Six of the narratives were handwritten. Before analysis, all narratives were compiled in electronic form and anonymized. The data corpus was standardized by saving the narratives with the font Times New Roman, font size 12 and line spacing 1.5, except for the longest, a 67-page text, which was saved with single line spacing.

2. The percentages are calculated against the group totals. The values are presented to an accuracy of one decimal point due to the small divider.

3. Most participants received more than one form of treatment.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suvi Holmberg

Suvi Holmberg, M.Soc.Sc, PhD student, works as a researcher at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Tampere University. Her academic background is in social work and her research interests focus on qualitative research of cancer in the context of everyday life.