Grant: Ontario Women's Health Council / IGH Mid-Career Award

Single parents represented 16 percent of all census families in 2006 in Canada, higher than any other recorded census figure in the last 75 years. Brown et al in a recent review called single parents of children with chronic disease an "understudied phenomenon". Studying the experiences of single parent families is important because the recent trend towards early discharge and care in the home has shifted the burden of care to parents who are increasingly involved in providing care for their children. For parents of children with cancer, it is unknown how the intensive and prolonged treatment for childhood cancer, which can result in increased burden on the primary caregiver and the family unit, impacts on the lives of single parent families. This study will use a qualitative design, with constructivist grounded theory as the guiding theoretical orientation. Interviews will be conducted with approximately 30 single parents of children with cancer. The specific aims are as follows: (1) to elucidate and to understand how single parents of children with cancer describe their experiences of caregiving;(2) to explore any special problems or challenges that single parents experience due to issues associated with being a single parents; (3) to explore single parents' descriptions of the care received from healthcare professionals looking after their child and the extent to which it is perceived by parents as being family-centered; and (4) to compare the caregiving experience of single mothers with that of single fathers. The interviews will provide extensive accounts of personal experience from participants. Coding will involve line-by-line, focused and theoretical coding. Theoretical sampling will be used to check and refine the emerging conceptual categories until data saturation is reached. Understanding the caregiving experience of single parent families will help us to determine whether and in what areas this subgroup of parents requires additional supports.