Abstract
Aims and objectives The aim was to generate a grounded theory about female adolescent behaviour in the sun.
Background Nurses have key roles in health promotion and skin cancer prevention. Adolescents’ resistance to sun safety messages and their vulnerability to sunburn is of concern internationally. Understanding why young women do as they do in the sun may enhance skin cancer prevention but their behaviour has not been explained before in the UK.
Design The study incorporated a qualitative grounded theory design using the approach of Glaser.
Methods: Qualitative data were gleaned from group and one-to-one, semi-structured interviews with 20 female participants aged 14 to 17, research memos and literature. Sampling was purposive and theoretical. Data collection, analysis and theory generation occurred concurrently. Data were analysed using the constant comparative method. Data collection ended when a substantive theory had been generated.
Results Data analysis revealed five categories of findings: Fitting In, Being Myself, Being Physically Comfortable, Slipping Up and Being Comfortable (the core category). The theory generated around the core explains how young women direct their sun-related activities toward meeting their physical and psychosocial comfort needs.
Conclusions A contribution of this research is the grounded theory explaining the behaviour of young women in the sun. Further, the theory challenges assumptions that female adolescents necessarily take risks; it explains their sun-related activities in terms of comfort. The theory extends findings from other researchers’ descriptive qualitative studies and also appears to apply to young people in countries other than the UK.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1889-1889 |
Number of pages | 1 |
Journal | Journal of Clinical Nursing |
Volume | 23 |
Issue number | 13-14 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 25 Dec 2013 |
Bibliographical note
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Norton, E., Holloway, I. and Galvin, K. (2014), Comfort vs risk: a grounded theory about female adolescent behaviour in the sun. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 23: 1889–1899 which has been published in final form at 10.1111/jocn.12481. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-ArchivingKeywords
- adolescent sun-related behaviour
- comfort
- grounded theory
- health promotion
- nursing
- primary prevention
- public health
- qualitative research
- skin cancer
- sun safety