ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on meaning-making coping, which includes religious and spiritually oriented coping methods, and against the background of existing controversies and disagreements surrounding definitions in the field of health, religion, and spirituality. It describes that a contextual approach to coping and health, is based on an international research project aimed at identifying culturally bound coping methods used by cancer patients in several countries, namely Sweden, China, South Korea, Malaysia, and Turkey. The book indicates that the relation between body and soul has an impact on the use of meaning-making coping strategies among cancer patients in Chinese and Korean countries. It investigates the assumed prevalence of religious and spiritually oriented coping methods among cancer patients in Sweden. The book focuses the coping with cancer characteristics in secular societies and non-religious segments of the populations.
