Identifying Stigma: The Road to Lung Cancer Advocacy

This research uses a grounded theory approach to develop theory on stigma in the lung cancer experience. Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer death in the United States. In 2009 alone, approximately 219,440 people were expected to be diagnosed with this disease; over 159,000 would die (American Cancer Society, 2009). Putting this into perspective, more people die of lung cancer each year than breast cancer, prostate cancer, colon cancer, liver cancer, kidney cancer, and melanoma combined. Though progress has been made for other cancers, the prognosis for lung cancer continues to be very poor (Ries et al., 2005) with seventy percent of those newly diagnosed at the advanced stage level (Albert & Samet, 2003). T