Sense of coherence and mastery as predictors of quality of life in an oncological sample

Background: We evaluated the role of sense of coherence and sense of mastery as predictors of quality of life (QoL) in a female tumor sample, considering the different site-disease (i.e. breast, endometrial and ovary). Methods: Short Form Health Survey (SF-36, Ware & Sherbourne, 1992), EORTC-Quality of Life Questionnaire Breast Module (EORTC-QLQ BR23, Aaronson et al., 1993), Sense of Coherence Scale (SOC, Antonovsky, 1979) and Sense of Mastery Scale (SOM, Pearlin & Schooler 1978) were administered to 61 women with endometrial cancer, 131 with breast cancer and 44 with ovary cancer. Hierarchical regression analyses with age, prognosis, SOC and SOM as predictors and QoL as dependent variable were performed. Findings: SOC meaningfulness, SOC manageability and SOM were significant predictors of QoL in all the subgroups with the exception of ovary cancer. The explained variance was about 30%. Discussion: Positive psychological characteristics of cancer patients seem to be important predictors of QoL.