The Influence of Parent Cancer-Related Posttraumatic Stress on Attitudes towards Trauma-Focused Sibling Interventions
Mentor Name: Kristen Long
Siblings of children with cancer face elevated risk for emotional and behavioral difficulties, including moderate to severe cancer-related posttraumatic stress. In response to siblings’ psychosocial needs, the provision of psychosocial support to siblings was established as a standard of pediatric cancer care. Despite this standard, there is a lack of empirically-validated interventions for siblings of children with cancer. Our research group has been working to develop and pilot-test a telehealth-based group intervention to address cancer-related posttraumatic stress in siblings of youth with cancer. This program is grounded in trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) and aims to gradually increase siblings’ opportunities to process cancer-related cues through conversations about the cancer with parents. Recent studies from outside of pediatric psycho-oncology have found that parent posttraumatic stress and avoidance behaviors predict higher rates of treatment dropout and worse child treatment outcomes in standard TF-CBT, leading to calls for greater attention to parent psychopathology in the design of trauma interventions for youth. Yet, the role of parent posttraumatic stress in family engagement with sibling trauma-focused interventions in pediatric cancer has not been studied.
The proposed study aims to address this gap by investigating how parents’ own cancer-related posttraumatic stress symptoms influence their attitudes towards and willingness to participate in sibling trauma-focused care. I will stratify data based on quantitative measures of parent cancer-related posttraumatic stress (i.e., the PCL-6) and will use a convergent mixed-methods approach to explore how qualitatively-measured parent attitudes towards sibling trauma-focused interventions differ between parents with high versus low cancer-related posttraumatic stress. Parent attitudes towards and willingness to engage with sibling trauma-focused programs will be assessed via semi-structured interviews with parents of children with cancer. This qualitative data will then be coded using both inductive and deductive approaches and analyzed using Applied Thematic Analysis. The main aspects of the proposed POST project are to: (1) conduct the mixed-methods analysis, (2) submit findings for a poster presentation at a national conference, and (3) disseminate findings via a peer-reviewed manuscript. Findings will inform the design of trauma-focused interventions for siblings of children with cancer to maximize intervention acceptability and effectiveness for families with different levels of parent posttraumatic stress, thereby decreasing the burden of cancer on the whole family
