Personality and Cancer Care Survey

Are you an adult with a current or past cancer diagnosis? Are you interested in learning more about your personality?

If so, you may be qualified to participate in an online survey about personality and cancer care conducted by a research team at Tulane University. The study is a one-time anonymous survey that takes about 30 minutes to complete. The survey does not ask for participants' names, contact information, or any other personally identifying information.

As a participant, you will receive personalized feedback about your results on a personality test. Additional survey questions will ask about your demographics, health history, mood, and feelings about your cancer care. Researchers hope that the study will build knowledge that can help people with cancer to be more satisfied with their care.

Goal of the study

The goal of this study is to understand whether providing participants with individualized personality feedback can improve factors related to symptom management and healthcare decision making.

Why you should participate

Participants in this study may benefit personally through experiencing an increased level of self-awareness or personal insight, as well as improved knowledge of personality and how it may influence healthcare decisions and outcomes.

Researchers hope the results of this study will also build knowledge that will help future patients be more satisfied with their cancer care. For example, despite strong evidence that personality characteristics are related to key physical and emotional cancer outcomes, knowledge of these relationships is rarely used in a way that could benefit patients’ quality of life.

What is the impact of improved self-awareness?

To our knowledge, this is the first test of whether directly providing personality feedback can help people with a history of cancer self-manage their symptoms and treatment, through improving their self-awareness, self-confidence, and/or mood.

Self-management is an increasingly important aspect of cancer care, given that cancer has become a chronic illness that millions of Americans live with for years as a current or past diagnosis.

This study could pave the way for the development, dissemination, and implementation of interventions designed to benefit the cancer community more broadly by educating patients and providing feedback about the relationships between personality and healthcare.