Journal 10: Literature Review Charting

 

I was pleased to find a multitude of articles for my Literature Review Charting Project.  I have found close to 20 articles.  I have found that while there is a lot of literature on certain parts of my topic-I have to craft my own, specific topic and do all the work of digging a hole to plant the tree.  For example, I would like to study psychosocial/family support for children or adolescents with chemotherapy-induced alopecia.

I have come across two dissertations about the family system and the alopecia.  However, the first dissertation I am interested in reading is for alopecia-areata, an autoimmune disorder.  The other dissertation is about women breast cancer survivors in the UK, and it studies familial disclosure.

Another article that is close to my topic is “The lived experience of stigmatization due to chemotherapy-induced hair loss for young women with cancer who attend college” I am interested in this topic because of the word stigmatization and because college-age is a time of transition, similar to adolescents.

I would also like to study gender differences and children.  There is this one article called, “Gender differences in psychosocial outcomes of hair loss resulting from childhood irradiation for tinea capitis.”  It focuses on tinea capitis, which is a fungal infection of the scalp.  This is very different from chemotherapy-induced alopecia.  I read that those with alopecia disorders many times get mistaken as cancer patients and do not want to be treated as such.  Another article studies the “severity of hair loss.”  It is a longitudinal study of mental health outcomes in women who had tinea capitis in childhood.

There are many keywords in my research.

·        Quality of life

·        Self-esteem, self-concept, and body image

·        Psychosocial impact

·        Psychological sequelae

·        Psychosocial needs.

And I will leave it at that!  I think what my mentor said was true.  Pick a dissertation topic you will love because you will end up hating it after a while!

 

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