“IT’S DIFFICULT, DON’T TALK ABOUT IT, COMPLICATED AND A CHORE ” A comparison on the occurrence of death taboo between online forums for bereavement after suicide or loss of a partner
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2020-08-31
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en
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The present paper integrated concepts and methods from death studies, discursive psychology, and communication sciences to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the matter of online mourning. Previous research on online communities in mourning found that these were not that different from offline communities, in the sense that both help form communal bonds. In the case of online mourning after suicide specifically, studies show contradictions and inconsistencies, however. Combining concepts and methods from death studies, discursive psychology, and communication sciences, two descriptive analysis were conducted on a social media forum for grieving after suicide and for grieving after the loss of a partner. A top-down analysis, based on identified topics by Malik and Coulson (2010) and Pawelzyk (2013), showed that users interact differently on both forums. These differences may be explained by the different cause of death, the relationship to the deceased, and the introduction at the top of the forum. A bottom-up analysis, unbiased by prior categories but influenced by notions from discursive psychology, complemented the top-down analysis to disambiguate problematic categorisations, such as dividing the broad notion ‘requesting information or advice’ into separate the question categories ‘asking to relate’, ‘request for empathy’, ‘how are you?’, and ‘request for information’, and to define utterances that did not fit in any pre-existing category, such as describing negative traits of the deceased.
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Faculteit der Letteren