Resilience and Psychosocial Function Among Mainland Chinese Parents of Children With Cancer: A Cross-sectional Survey.

Background: Resilience is commonly used to refer to the capacity to resist negative psychological reactions when encountering aversive circumstances. However, clinicians generally define resilience as a lack of psychological distress or an adoption of positive attitude in response to a potentially traumatic event. Although resilience was initially considered to be a psychological variable, it has gradually become seen as a psychosocial indicator now used in clinical settings in the Western world but is still a relatively new topic in most Eastern countries. In this study, we aimed to extend our understandings of the psychological responses of a group of mainland Chinese parents upon being informed that their children were diagnosed with cancer, using resilience as a major indicator.

Objective: The aim of this study was to evaluate the level of resilience among mainland Chinese parents in response to knowing that their children were diagnosed with cancer and to examine the relationships between resilience and other psychosocial outcomes.

Methods: A descriptive and a cross-sectional survey design was used and involved a sample of 125 parents who visited a specialist cancer hospital in southeast China between September 2013 and February 2014.

Results: The participants reported lower level of resilience as compared with a control population in the Chinese community (P < .01). Resilience was negatively correlated with uncertainty in illness (P < .01) and depression (P < .01) and was positively correlated with social support (P < .01) and all other positive coping strategies subscales (P < .01). Parents from the high- resilience group reported better psychosocial functions than did those from the low-resilience group (P < .01). In addition, 6 influencing factors were identified and entered into the multiple linear regression equation of psychological resilience, which predicts 38.3% (adjusted R) of total variation in psychological resilience.

Conclusion: A high level of resilience in parents of children diagnosed with cancer is associated with better psychosocial function in response to the traumatic event.

Implications For Clinical Practice: Additional attention should be given to those Mainland Chinese parents who demonstrated a low level of resilience in response to their child's diagnosis. This is particularly important because of the long and stressful process for cancer treatment. Clinicians should also provide targeted interventions to those parents to promote their psychological resilience.