Whose informational needs are considered? A comparison between cancer patients and their spouses' perceptions of their own and their partners' knowledge and informational needs

Yoram Bar-Tal, Sivia Barnoy and Bracha Zisser

Social Science & Medicine, 2005, vol. 60, issue 7, 1459-1465

Abstract: The present study examines information exchange patterns between 98 married couples in Israel where one is a cancer patient and the other is the main caregiver. Specifically, the accuracy of each spouse's perception of the extent of knowledge and the need to receive more disease-related information is examined as a function of the role (patient-caregiver) and gender of the participants. The results showed that women, regardless of their role, were inaccurate in their perception of their husbands' knowledge and motivation to know more. For men, a difference between the roles was found for the perception of their wives' knowledge. As caregivers, they were inaccurate while as patients they were accurate in this estimation. Their perception of their wives' needs to know more was accurate. Moreover, female patients, more than male, relied on their perception of themselves when assessing their spouse's knowledge and informational needs. Thus, it is concluded that female patients were more egocentric and their perception of their spouse's preferences was influenced by their own needs. The results demonstrated that in the context of cancer patients and their spouse as caregivers, neither partner considered the informational needs of his or her spouse.

Keywords: Cancer; Informational; needs; Caregivers; Gender; Perceptions; Israel (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(04)00386-7
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:60:y:2005:i:7:p:1459-1465

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().