Using Innovative Methods to Help Young People Reflect on the Meaning of Growing up with Cancer

More adolescents and young adults are surviving cancer diagnosis and treatment than ever before. The experience of a life-threatening illness and onerous treatments may impact heavily on a young person’s developing sense of self by disrupting their efforts to achieve independence, maintain social relationships and realise life goals. In order to explore this issue, we are inviting young people between the ages of 14 and 29 years to make sense of their experience using a combination of semi-structured interview and creative techniques for self expression (e.g. photography, painting, music). Recruits are first invited to participate in a semi-structured interview that is designed to elicit a spoken account of growing up with cancer. We then invite them to create a self-portrait in collaboration with a photo media artist who is a co-investigator on the project, the theme of which is the impact of cancer on their identity. In a follow-up interview, we invite each participant to reflect on topics raised in the first interview, on the content of the self-portrait, and on the creative process that generated it. Combining traditional interviews with creative expression was intended to make participation in research more attractive to young people. Combining different modes of communication increases the potential for making meanings on topics such as identity, which young people may otherwise find conceptually challenging. In this chapter we present early findings from the project and discuss how young people make sense of their illness experience in terms of their relationships with friends and peers.