Gift givers hope that their gift will appropriately communicate their feelings and bring the recipient joy. But that's not always the reality. Gifts can be tricky and rife with hidden hazards. Relationships can even be ruined when the mismatch between the giver's intention and the recipient's perceptions of it is too vast. As sociologists, we use techniques such as in-depth interviews to study the experiences, feelings and motivations of specific groups of people. I focus on restaurant workers and my colleague on migrants and minorities. But in 2021, we were both diagnosed with cancer in our early 30s ' breast cancer for me and endometrial cancer for her. This encouraged us to explore the experiences of other young women dealing with cancer. By 2023, we had interviewed 50 millennial women diagnosed with cancer about a plethora of social and emotional topics related to their illness. Our own bouts with cancer revealed curious patterns in the gifts we very gratefully received from...
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