Intended for healthcare professionals

Rapid response to:

Papers

Influence of psychological coping on survival and recurrence in people with cancer: systematic review

BMJ 2002; 325 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.325.7372.1066 (Published 09 November 2002) Cite this as: BMJ 2002;325:1066

Rapid Response:

Wrong conclusions drawn from insufficient research

As I have mailed Dr. Petticrew right after having published the
article in BMJ, I referred particularly to the insufficient state of the
art in psychooncology research. Studies using large symples - as it is the
case in Dr. Petticrews studies, too - use questionnaires to investigate
coping in patients (for reasons of convenience). This is the very reason
for mixed or confusing results. What patients believe what they do is not
valid! We as researchers have to go the 'extra-mile' and have to use
qualitative/quantitative interviews. On a high methodological level with
high interrater reliabilities, qualitative content analyses of semi-
strucured interviews (sentence by sentence ratings following excplicit
rating manuals as we have done in our study, Tschuschke et al., 2001) one
succeeds in predicting survival by objective ratings of coping behavior
(as it is seen as a strong tendency in Dr. Petticrews article: nearly all
smaller studies used interviews as basis for coping assessments and found
evidence for a relationship between coping and survival!).

Competing interests:
None declared

Competing interests: No competing interests

09 October 2005
Volker Tschuschke, Prof. Dr.
Head of Department of Medical Psychology
University Hospital, Cologne, Germany