Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2015 Oct;40(9):904-13.
doi: 10.1093/jpepsy/jsv036. Epub 2015 May 11.

Profiles of Connectedness: Processes of Resilience and Growth in Children With Cancer

Katianne M Howard Sharp  1 , Victoria W Willard  2 , Yuko Okado  2 , Rachel Tillery  1 , Sarah Barnes  1 , Alanna Long  2 , Sean Phipps  3
Affiliations

Profiles of Connectedness: Processes of Resilience and Growth in Children With Cancer

Katianne M Howard Sharp et al. J Pediatr Psychol. 2015 Oct.

Abstract

Objective: Identified patterns of connectedness in youth with cancer and demographically similar healthy peers.

Method: Participants included 153 youth with a history of cancer and 101 youth without a history of serious illness (8-19 years). Children completed measures of connectedness, posttraumatic stress symptoms (PTSS), and benefit-finding. Parents also reported on children's PTSS.

Results: Latent profile analysis revealed four profiles: high connectedness (45%), low connectedness (6%), connectedness primarily to parents (40%), and connectedness primarily to peers (9%). These profiles did not differ by history of cancer. However, profiles differed on PTSS and benefit-finding. Children highly connected across domains displayed the lowest PTSS and highest benefit-finding, while those with the lowest connectedness had the highest PTSS, with moderate PTSS and benefit-finding for the parent and peer profiles.

Conclusion: Children with cancer demonstrate patterns of connectedness similar to their healthy peers. Findings support connectedness as a possible mechanism facilitating resilience and growth.

Keywords: adjustment; cancer; children; connectedness; resilience.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Latent profiles of children’s perceived connectedness across domains.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Comparisons of adjustment across classes. Categories with different letters in the superscript were significantly different at p < .05.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Similar articles

See all similar articles

Cited by

See all "Cited by" articles

References

    1. American Psychiatric Association. (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-Text Revision (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
    1. Aronowitz T., Morrison-Beedy D. (2004). Resilience to risk-taking behaviors in impoverished African American girls: The role of mother-daughter connectedness. Research in Nursing and Health, 27, 29–39. doi: 10.1002/nur.20004 - PubMed
    1. Asparouhov T., Muthén B. (2012). Auxiliary variables in mixture modeling: A 3-step approach using Mplus. Mplus Web Note 15. Retrieved from https://www.statmodel.com/download/webnotes/webnote15.pdf
    1. Asparouhov T., Muthén B. (2014). Auxiliary variables in mixture modeling: Using the BCH method in Mplus to estimate a distal outcome model and an arbitrary second model. Mplus Web Notes: No. 21 Retrieved from https://www.statmodel.com/download/asparouhov_muthen_2014.pdf
    1. Bakk Z., Vermunt J. K. (2014). Robustness of stepwise latent class modeling with continuous distal outcomes. Forthcoming in Structural Equation Modeling: A Multidisciplinary Journal. Retrieved from http://members.home.nl/jeroenvermunt/bakk2014.pdf

Publication types