Coping Online with Loss: Implications for Offline Clinical Contexts
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Abstract
Death, whether of a family member or a friend, causes a biographical disruption in the life of the individual left behind (Bury, 1982). This article examines the computer-mediated setting of online memorials, which provide expressive freedom for survivors to share their memories of loved ones who have passed away and to communicate their lived experience of loss. The study qualitatively scrutinizes the situated realization of coping on the basis of a corpus of 220 memorial entries taken from a high-traffic American memorial website. The methods and insights of computer-mediated discourse analysis (Herring, 2004) and conversation analysis (Pomerantz, 1986) make it possible to unpack the concept of coping in terms of the themes (Braun & Clarke, 2006) as well as the interactional and discursive practices used by the survivors. The findings are also discussed in terms of their professional relevance to the work of psychotherapists and counselors helping clients in offline contexts to process their grief (cf. Sarangi, 2002; Roberts & Sarangi, 2003).
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