Burden of Cancer in Children: A Pilot Study to Investigate the Impact and Content of Video Illness Narratives

In order to gain a greater understanding of the full experience of children with life-threatening illness, this study will provide video cameras to ten to fifteen 10-18 years olds in active treatment for cancer, and instruct them to make video illness narratives over the course of 1-3 months. The narratives will be studied as an intervention; each of the participants will be administered a measure of physical symptoms (the Memorial Symptom Assessment scale 10-18) and a measure of self-esteem (the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale). The video narratives will also be analyzed for content by theme in order to understand the participants' experiences in their own words. Our hypothesis is that these narratives will provide insight into the lives of children with cancer, increase their self-esteem, and decrease symptom distress, and improve communication between patients and their doctors.