title: Religion as an empowerment context in the narrative of women with breast cancer.
abstract: This paper aims at exploring women's meaningful perception, semantic understanding, and their experiences of breast cancer in a religion context. Accordingly, eight women who had one of their breasts completely removed by surgery (mastectomy) were studied by narrative interviews. In this narrative interview, participants told their life stories since the beginning of disease. Findings showed that religious concepts have a heightened role in the interpretation and understanding of disease, coping strategies, and gaining new concepts for life and death. Two main themes discovered in this research were fatalism on the one hand, and the hope and empowerment on the other. Despite the intrinsic conflict between these two concepts, religion, as a specific cultural and epistemological context, reconciles them; in a way, these polar concepts form a unitary structure of meaning and activity. In this structure, semantic coherence and concrete experience leads women with breast cancer to a new meaningful system, which shapes a new path for living well.
authors.affiliation: Health Policy Research Center (HPRC), Shiraz University of Medical Science, Building No 2, Eighth Floor, School of Medicine, Zand Avenue, 71348-53185, Shiraz, Iran, asadati@sums.ac.ir.
authors.forename: Ahmad Kalateh
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Sadati
authors.forename: Kamran Bagheri
authors.initials: KB
authors.lastname: Lankarani
authors.forename: Vahid
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Gharibi
authors.forename: Mahmood Exiri
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Fard
authors.forename: Najmeh
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Ebrahimzadeh
authors.forename: Sedigeh
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tahmasebi
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D001294:Attitude to Health; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000523:psychology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D033262:Narration; D011209:Power, Psychological; D036301:Qualitative Research; D012069:Religion and Psychology