| Women in the United States have a 1 in 8 lifetime risk of developing breast cancer, with nearly 300,000 new cases diagnosed in 2003. However, due to early diagnosis and enhanced medical treatments, women with breast cancer are one of the largest groups of cancer survivors. With more women are living through this experience, it is important to understand the factors that impact her long-term psychosocial adjustment. This study examined the impact of body image importance and gender-role identity with regard to psychosocial adjustment in a group of African American, Caucasian and Latina women.; The battery of questionnaires included: (1) gender role identity (The Personal Attributes Questionnaire); (2) body image importance (The Appearance Schema Inventory); (3) body image post breast cancer (The Body Image Scale, The Body Image Post Cancer Inventory); and (4) psychosocial adjustment (EORTC-QLQ-C30 & EORTC-QLQ-BR23). Significant differences among these variables were found for age with younger women attributing greater importance to their body image, but reporting lower body image satisfaction and poorer psychosocial adjustment compared to older women. A model consisting of the above variables was tested and found Body Image Importance significantly contributed to Body Image Post Breast Cancer, and Body Image Post Breast Cancer helped to explain 59% of the variance in Psychosocial Adjustment for the entire sample. This model was also tested with three age categories and showed Body Image Post Breast Cancer significantly contributed to Psychosocial Adjustment for each age category. The Femininity variable was found to significantly contribute to Body Image Post Breast Cancer for the youngest group of women. For the eldest group, neither the measure of Femininity nor Body Image Importance was found to significantly contribute to Psychosocial Adjustment. Possible reasons for these age differences were explored. |
