Family caregiver perspective-taking and accuracy in estimating cancer patient symptom experiences

As family caregivers assume more prominent roles in the provision of home care to persons with serious illness, investigators must test the effectiveness of novel interventions to facilitate family caring for cancer patients. This article is based on results derived from a larger study carried out in Canada that was designed to compare 98 advanced cancer patient and family caregiver perceptions of 32 patient symptom experiences as captured by the Memorial Symptom Assessment Scale. We examined two main questions: (1) whether "natural" family caregivers' perceptions of patient lack of energy and worrying are more closely related to a self- or patient-oriented viewpoint and (2) whether induced "imagine-patient" perspective-taking can assist caregivers to achieve better perceptual accuracy. The caregiver's natural responses to neutral instructions that neither encouraged nor discouraged perspective-taking served as the baseline comparison with three other instructional sets, in which caregivers were prompted to: (1) provide a self-report on their own symptom experiences, (2) imagine how they would feel in the patient's situation (imagine-self), or (3) imagine how the patient would respond to his or her symptom situation (imagine-patient). Findings suggested that the family caregivers' natural judgments correspond most closely to what they do under an imagine-patient set than to what they do under any other set. Findings with respect to accuracy indicated that instructions to imagine the patient's perspective helped to prompt adjustments down from a self-oriented viewpoint, although definitive conclusions were precluded by difficulties with order effects.