The Psychological, Familial and Ethical Aspects of Genetic Counseling for Breast and Ovarian Cancer. A Qualitative, Psychological and Psycholinguistic Research.

The Oncogenetic Team of thc Free University of Brussels is offering testing for individuals of families with a genetic predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer. In the future it will be possible to offer this test Oil a wide scale to high-risk families. As Oncogenctic Team we consider it our duty to examine the psychosocial processes and ethical implications of this testing. The project aims at answering the following questions: 1. Which are the motivations of patients to undergo genetic screening for breast and ovarian cancer? 2 Which influencc have the existing patterns of interaction in the family on the decision of the propositus to inform or not inform his/her relatives? The data consists of approximately 100 verbatirn transcripts of oncogenetic counseling sessions. The qualitative rescarch metlhod is based on the "grounded theory" of Strauss and Corbin. This approach uses a systematic set of procedures to develop an inductivcly derived grounded theory about a phenomenon. The pragmatic-semantic analysis of the verbatim transcripts also applies techniques, developed from the research in conversation analysis.