Staff Articles
- Positive Emotions and Academic Achievement
- Narrative Expression of the Emotional Experience of Breast Cancer Survivors
- The Impact of Zero Tolerance Policies on the Relation Between Educational Attainment and Crime
- Teachers’ Support of Preschoolers’ Emergent Literacy through Play
- Psychological Well-being of Refugees Throughout the Relocation Process
- The Effects of Sexual Objectification on Women’s Mental Health
- Gang Involvement as a Means to Satisfy Basic Needs
- Chinese Adolescents’ Self-Esteem and Mental Health Outcomes: The Role of Permissive Parenting
- Effects of Mentoring on Students’ Academic Success
- Exploring Parental Self-Efficacy and Preschoolers’ School Readiness
- Latino Parenting Practices and Preschoolers’ Self-Regulation Skills
- Measurement of Shame among Juvenile Justice-Involved Girls
- Peer Mentorship and the Well-being of Women with Breast Cancer
- Positive Emotions and Academic Achievement
- System Justification and Mental Health Outcomes in Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth
- The Combined Influence of Parenting and Early Puberty on Disruptive Behavior Problems in African American Girls
- The Development of Internal State Language: The Role of Age, Gender and Context
Sarah Fox
Faculty Mentor | Dr. Adina Schick
Breast cancer affects an extensive number of women in the United States each year, be they survivors or current patients. Both patients and survivors have unique social support needs. Peer mentorship (PM), an intervention in which breast cancer survivors act as mentors toward women currently going through treatment for breast cancer, could simultaneously provide aid for both patients and survivors. These programs provide social support to patients and give survivors an opportunity to make meaning from their cancer experience by helping another woman navigate her own. However, very little is known about outcomes of peer mentorships for patients and even less is known about survivor outcomes. This research proposal seeks to evaluate the efficacy of a peer mentorship intervention on the well-being of breast cancer patients and survivors. The proposed study will use patients and survivors from the Reach to Recovery peer mentorship program run by the American Cancer Society in the treatment group and patients and survivors sampled from five United States hospitals in the control group. Measures of quality of life will be compared between patients participating and not participating in PM, survivors participating and not participating in PM, and patients and survivors participating in PM. Positive outcomes from the proposed study could provide evidence for an intervention which could help patient through the difficult physical and emotional experience of breast cancer treatment, as well as provide survivors with a resource to increase their own quality of life while bringing attention to their unique needs as survivors.