Breast Cancer Patients’ Parenting Concerns User Personas: A Qualitative Analysis

Breast cancer disproportionately affects young women raising minor children. Unresolved parenting concerns can impair patients mental health, reduce treatment adherence, and compromise long-term oncological outcomes. However, previous studies have paid limited attention to the heterogeneity of parenting concerns in this population and lack a theory-grounded classification framework for stratified supportive care. This descriptive qualitative study, framed by social role theory, recruited 17 Chinese breast cancer patients through maximum variation sampling and conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews. From four dimensions—role expectation, role load, role resources, and role adaptation—the study extracted four distinct parenting concern personas: role overload, role strain, role resilience, and role disablement. The four subgroups differed significantly in maternal role expectations, treatment-related physical burden, family support resources, and coping strategies. These findings can assist clinicians in identifying the specific types of distress faced by different patient subgroups, thereby providing a basis for developing stratified and individualized precision support strategies.