Abstract
BackgroundThe significance of metaphors for the experience of cancer has been the topic of extensive previous research, with “Battle” and “Journey” metaphors standing out as key. Adaptation to the patient’s use of metaphor is generally believed to be an important aspect of person-centered care, especially in palliative care. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of metaphors in blogs written in Swedish by people living with advanced cancer and explore possible patterns associated with individuals, age and gender.MethodsThe study is based on a dataset totaling 2,602,479 words produced some time during the period 2007–2016 by 27 individuals diagnosed with advanced cancer. Both qualitative and quantitative procedures were used, and the findings are represented as raw frequencies as well as normalized frequencies per 10,000 words. Our general approach was exploratory and descriptive. The Mann-Whitney U test was used to analyze statistical significance.ResultsOur results confirm the strong foothold of “Journey” and “Battle” metaphors. “Imprisonment” and “Burden” metaphors were also used by the majority of the individuals. The propensity to use metaphors when describing the cancer experience was found to differ extensively across the individuals. However, individuals were not found to opt for one conceptualization over the other but tended to draw on several different metaphor domains when conceptualizing their experience. Socio-demographic factors such as age or gender were not found to be strong predictors of metaphor choice in this limited study.ConclusionsUsing a range of different metaphors allows individuals with advanced cancer to highlight different aspects of their experience. The presence of metaphors associated with “Journey”, “Battle”, “Imprisonment” and “Burden” across individuals could be explained by the fact that the bloggers are part of a culturally consistent cohort, despite variations in age, sex and cancer form. Awareness of metaphors commonly used by patients can enhance health professionals’ capacity to identify metaphorical patterns and develop a common language grounded in the patients’ own metaphor use, which is an important requisite for person-centered palliative care.
Highlights
The significance of metaphors for the experience of cancer has been the topic of extensive previous research, with “Battle” and “Journey” metaphors standing out as key
The past few decades have seen a considerable change in ideology, from a situation where patients with incurable conditions such as advanced cancer were often protected from awareness of their impending death [1] towards full disclosure and openness about the trajectory of the disease [2]
The aim of this study was to investigate the use of metaphors in blogs written in Swedish by people living with advanced cancer and explore possible patterns associated with individuals, age and gender
Summary
The significance of metaphors for the experience of cancer has been the topic of extensive previous research, with “Battle” and “Journey” metaphors standing out as key. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of metaphors in blogs written in Swedish by people living with advanced cancer and explore possible patterns associated with individuals, age and gender. The past few decades have seen a considerable change in ideology, from a situation where patients with incurable conditions such as advanced cancer were often protected from awareness of their impending death [1] towards full disclosure and openness about the trajectory of the disease [2]. According to Conceptual Metaphor Theory, a highly influential model for metaphor research, metaphors are seen as consciously and creatively used phrases, but as a powerful cognitive phenomenon where our every-day use of language both reflects and affects our thinking in ways that often remain subconscious [5]. A similarity relation is thereby construed between the more concrete domain of meaning (labelled the source domain) and that which is abstract, i.e. the illness experience
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