The Effects of Group Counseling on Couples´ Intimacy Relationship among Breast Cancer Patients and Partners Author:Yu-Chan Li, Shueh-Lien Wang, Hui-Chun Liang, Pei-Yi Li
Research Article
The purpose of the study was to evaluate the effects of "Intimacygroup counseling" in enhancing the couples’ intimacy relationship for breast cancer patients and their partners. This study adopted follow-up explanations model of mixed methods, it used qualitative data to explain the result of quantitative data. In the part of quantitative research, one group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was used. The subjects were 11 couples, including patients with breast cancer and their partners. Marital Intimacy Inventory (MII) was employed to evaluate the effect. All the data were analyzed by the nonparametric test, such as Wilcoxon Signed Ranks test. In another part of qualitative research, the data of interviewing 11 couples after they finished the intimacygroup counseling was analyzed by the method of analytic induction. The findings of this study are obtained as follows: (1) The posttest scores were significantly higher than the pretest intimacy scores, which indicated that the contentof "Intimacy group counseling" was highly effective in enhancing the levels of intimacy for the breast cancer patients and partners, especially in "spiritual intimacy", "physical intimacy", and "emotion intimacy". (2) This group counseling was significantly useful to "low marital intimacy", "partner", and "male ". (3) There were an increase in sexual intimacy on breast cancer patients and partners of "low marital intimacy" by this group counseling, indicating"sexual intimacy" were still the issues of necessary in group counseling. (4) The group counseling improved different intimate efficacy between male and female, which showed the breast cancer couples had different intimacy needs.According to above findings, we could say the effective project of "Intimacygroup counseling" could be apply to breast cancer patients and partners in improving intimacy. We also discussed suggestions and limitations for the implications to practice and future research.