Abstract
Objective: Young adults with cancer are at a heightened risk for experiencing identity distress, with adverse consequence on their satisfaction with life (SwL). This study examines the contributions of two resources thought to mitigate identity distress: parental warmth and narrative creativity.
Methods: 164 young adults divided into three groups: (a) control group (no history of life-threatening medical illness); (b) recovered group, and (c) cancer group (currently in treatment) completed measures of SwL, identity distress, parental warmth, and narrative creativity.
Findings: The cancer group was associated with higher identity distress and there was a strong contribution of identity distress in decreased SwL across groups. Narrative creativity had a significant, direct effect on reduced identity distress, indirectly increasing SwL across groups.
Implications for psychosocial providers: These findings highlight the potential of creativity to decrease identity distress and in turn, improve SwL among patients with cancer.
Acknowledgement
We thank Mansi Shah, Brianna Heuser and Michelle Zaccario for their help with various aspects of this study and manuscript preparation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflicts of interest were reported by the authors.
Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Notes
1 The parent study (e.g., Barbot and Kaufman38) included multiple measures of creative potential, parenting, identity and well-being.
2 For the sake of model simplification, age was entered as continuous covariate, whereas race and ethnicity were combined as dichotomous covariate (with 1 denoting non-Hispanic Caucasian, and 0 all other race/ethnicities).
3 A preliminary multivariate analysis of variance with covariate (MANCOVA) did not detect any overall significant effect of a model incorporating all dependent variables and covariates at risk α .05 (F[8,300] = 1.40, p = .20). However, it revealed a negligible effect of age on narrative creativity (F[1,153] = 5.54, p = .02, η² = .01; translating into a correlation of r = .16, p = .04).