In plain language
Every year, more than 21,000 Australian adolescents and young adults face a parent’s new cancer diagnosis. Even when the prognosis is good, these young people deal with parental absences, disrupted family roles, extra caring responsibilities, and the looming threat of loss — yet there are very few evidence-based programs designed to support them. This paper lays out the rationale and full study design for evaluating Truce, a seven-week, face-to-face group program developed to fill that gap.
Truce is grounded in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a well-supported approach that seems particularly suited to this group: it teaches young people to accept what cannot be changed — such as the threat of cancer and the difficult feelings it brings — while still engaging in actions that reflect their values. The program is manualised, includes a participant workbook, and involves parents in one of its seven sessions. Rather than waiting for mental-health problems to appear, it takes a preventive approach for a group known to be at risk.
The trial is designed as a pragmatic controlled effectiveness study: young people aged 14 to 22 whose parent was diagnosed with cancer in the past five years are assigned to the program or to a wait-list control, with assessments before and after the program and at two-month follow-up. The researchers predict the program will reduce distress and increase psychological well-being, and they will also examine ACT processes such as experiential avoidance and mindfulness, family functioning, unmet needs, program fidelity, and satisfaction. As a protocol paper, it reports the planned methods rather than results, providing a transparent blueprint for the evaluation.
Key findings
- Truce is a manualised, seven-week, facilitated, face-to-face group program based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for young people aged 14–22 who have a parent diagnosed with cancer within the last five years.
- The trial uses a pragmatic 2 (intervention vs wait-list control) × 3 (pre-treatment, post-treatment, 2-month follow-up) repeated-measures design, with a target of 65 participants per condition.
- The primary hypothesis is that participants will show significant reductions in distress and increases in psychological well-being relative to wait-list controls, maintained at two-month follow-up.
- Secondary analyses will examine ACT-related processes (experiential avoidance and mindfulness), family functioning, unmet needs, demographic moderators, program fidelity, and satisfaction.
- The sixth session involves both the young person and their parent, and the program design draws on Olson’s Circumplex Model of family functioning.
- The trial is registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12615000761561).
How to cite
APA
Patterson, P., McDonald, F. E. J., Ciarrochi, J., Hayes, L., Tracey, D., Wakefield, C. E., & White, K. (2015). A study protocol for Truce: A pragmatic controlled trial of a seven-week acceptance and commitment therapy program for young people who have a parent with cancer. BMC Psychology, 3, 31. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-015-0087-y
BibTeX
@article{patterson2015study,
author = {Patterson, Pandora and McDonald, Fiona E. J. and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Hayes, Louise and Tracey, Danielle and Wakefield, Claire E. and White, Kate},
title = {A study protocol for Truce: a pragmatic controlled trial of a seven-week acceptance and commitment therapy program for young people who have a parent with cancer},
journal = {BMC Psychology},
year = {2015},
volume = {3},
pages = {31},
doi = {10.1186/s40359-015-0087-y}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version via the DOI above.