Phenomenology in pediatric cancer nursing research.

What does it mean to have cancer as a child or adolescent? To understand this, researchers must study the illness from the child's point of view and listen to these children's descriptions of their "lived world." Phenomenology is a qualitative research methodology that can be used to discover and interpret meaning. To use phenomenology congruently, the philosophical background must be understood as well as the adaptation of the philosophical basis to research in the caring sciences. Only when clinicians truly understand the meaning of this illness to the child can they design nursing interventions to ease suffering and increase quality of life in children and adolescents with cancer.