Search results

Studies have identified low levels of social support as one of several risk factors for poor psychological outcome following bereavement. Despite this fact, little is known about how bereaved individuals interpret and define social support or which behaviors they perceive as helpful (Cacciatore, Thieleman, Fretts, & Jackson, 2021). The present study seeks to understand the experiences of the support received by Danish families who have lost a parent to death. Individuals recruited from a mutual bereavement support group (N = 87, 25–59 years old) responded to an online survey, which yielded both quantitative and qualitative data, the latter from open-ended questions and comment boxes. The results demonstrated a variety of sources of support. However, some of the bereaved individuals also reported a decided lack of help for both adults and children post-loss. As most respondents were women (93%), future research might shed more light on possible gender differences in the expectations, needs, and experiences of social support in bereavement. The study participants provided elaborate suggestions for the improvement of bereavement support, such as, practical help, access to bereavement support groups, more knowledge on bereavement and grief in the Danish society, and easier access to peer support. The chapter revealed an apparent lack of coordination of the support for parentally bereaved families. Additionally, some groups of bereaved children seemed to be particularly vulnerable and overlooked, namely the very young children, children in late adolescence/young adulthood, and children with special needs.

Bereavement is far reaching and has a significant impact on many lives as widow(er)s are faced with countless changes to their everyday routines, their relationships and their consumption patterns. It is in this context that the purpose of this study is to examine the links between the meanings of bereavement for widows and the types and sources of social support sought. This deepens the understanding of the reasons for the success or failure of service encounters and thus contributes to consumer well-being.

A qualitative study was carried out to gain more insight into this issue. A total of 24 in-depth interviews were conducted with French widows 59 years of age and older. To fully understand the diversity of bereavement experiences, the authors examined the following factors: life trajectory, life, as the spouse’s/partner’s death, support received and/or solicited and the success or failure of service encounters.

The findings suggest that bereavement experiences hold different meanings related to the types and sources of the preferred support. The following six classes were identified: dealing with administrative and financial issues, maintaining parental roles, enduring the memories of the circumstances of the spouse’s/partner’s death, reorganizing daily life, facing the loneliness of widowhood and expressing the affects of bereavement. These classes help to identify the conditions for the success or failure of service encounters.

The following two avenues emerge that contribute to the well-being of widows: “loss-oriented” and “restoration-oriented” bereavement classes of meanings. The former is embodied by widows primarily seeking “nurturant support” who expect self-oriented and relationship-focused service behaviour on the part of service providers, and the latter by widows primarily seeking “action-facilitating” support who expect “task-oriented” service behaviour from service providers. These results should allow service providers to be aware of when to prioritize the task, the self and/or the relationship, to provide a successful service encounter for consumers of bereavement services.

Grief and its concomitant loneliness are common problems in the social process of ageing. Using case study accounts, this paper describes the perceptions of four elderly bereaved people and their experiences of loneliness following conjugal bereavement. Case study accounts provide an opportunity to explore, describe and interpret data that may not yield to a simple analysis. In this paper the accounts include a collection of information on the respondents' experience of loss in the form of ‘durable biographies’ (Walter, 1996) that were typical, revelatory and critical. The respondents took part in semi‐structured interviews about their experiences as part of a larger ethnographic study. This paper reflects on their comments and raises a number of interesting theoretical and practical issues to do with loneliness following conjugal bereavement. The paper points out that bereavement research is dominated by psycho‐analytical conceptualisations which place emphasis on the ‘grief work’ hypoThesis, with less attention paid to bereavement models that highlight the social impact of loss on older people.

Bereavement and loss are key factors in poor emotional wellbeing among people with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD). However, little attention has been drawn to this group in the grief and disability literature. The purpose of this paper is to make sense of bereavement and loss in people with PMLD, with reference to theoretical contributions to the field and studies of grief reactions.

A systematic review revealed 34 relevant published works. These were analysed for relevant contributions.

Three main types of theoretical contributions have been made; traditional grief theories, cognitive approaches and attachment-based perspectives. Although a limited number of case studies exist, a range of grief reactions have been reported in people with PMLD. Traditional grief theories and cognitive approaches are somewhat limited in making sense of grief responses in this group, while attachment-based perspectives may prove useful in providing theoretical and therapeutic direction.

Further research is required to more accurately describe the nature of relationships in people with PMLD.

Major contributions to the field point to the value of facilitating engagement with the grieving process, through communication around the loss and training for staff. In addition, attachment-based perspectives are offering routes for establishing therapeutic relationships that may help to resolve behavioural difficulties.

This paper provides an overview of the perspectives within bereavement and disability, drawing together clear theoretical frameworks for future research and practice.

Is collaborative story production (CSP) a useful method to collaborate with bereaved families to record their reflections on the end of life circumstances and care of people of advanced age? The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Drawing from Te Pākeketanga, a bicultural study involving 58 bereaved Māori and non-Māori families on behalf of 52 older relatives, the authors describe the CSP method. Researchers and participants co-created personalised written stories about the older person and their end of life experiences, supported with photographs of family, friends and memorabilia. The authors aimed to uplift the status of the older person and their family by tangibly reflecting the significance and magnitude of what had been shared and to strengthen the research analysis.

CSP supported member checking, promoted a robust understanding of participants’ narratives and increased the trustworthiness of data and strengthened the Kaupapa Māori and social constructivist analysis. However, some participants experienced difficulty revisiting painful memories when reading their story. CSP took longer than anticipated, was labour intensive and required a highly skilled and resourced team to ensure participants benefitted.

Using the CSP method with a bicultural cohort of bereaved families who had provided care to someone over the age of 80 was very helpful in assisting the researchers to gather narrative information and present it back to participants in a story format for their comment and feedback. The method contributed a useful way to partner with bereaved family caregivers following the death of an older family member. The authors needed a way to record the participants’ narratives of the older person’s end of life circumstances and end of life care experiences. This was very important, particularly for grieving families and indigenous families who may have felt vulnerable engaging with research, and with the research processes. The approach provided a helpful and non-intrusive member-checking process. The unique bicultural study approach deliberately utilised the CSP method to assist the researchers to work safely with bereaved families as the participants reflected upon and explored not only the end of life circumstances of the older person, but they also focused on the “death” and their own bereavement experiences. CSP also provided a helpful member-checking method; the authors were working with highly sensitive information and wanted to ensure that the authors as researchers understood and interpreted the families’ narrative data correctly, according to their perspectives.

The use of “schedules of damages” to establish compensation amounts for injured parties appears to be more common in European personal injury or death compensation situations than in the similar legal situations in the United States. The major exception to this statement is the state-based system of workers’ compensation covering employer liability in personal injury and death claims in the United States. Other chapters in this book largely concentrate on comparisons between the uses of Ogden Table multipliers in awarding pecuniary damages in the United Kingdom compared to actuarial methods for calculating such damages in the United States. The two chapters dealing with non-pecuniary damages and scheduled awards deal with methods used to award such damages in the United States and in Europe in individual civil torts. This chapter provides an overview of a number of scheduled damages schemes in both the United States and Europe for the purpose of comparison. The schemes selected address both general and special damages.

Discussion of China's one-child policy generally centres on its demographic effects. Bereavement among parents of singleton children and the role of social capital in the bereavement process have been under-explored. The purpose of this paper is to focus on mothers who lost their only children during the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. The paper aims to discuss the under-explored yet crucial issues of the one-child policy – the ways in which Chinese bereaved mothers handle the death of their singleton children – and the roles that social capital can play in their bereavement process.

The author conducted eight case studies on bereaved mothers through home visits, semi-structured interviews and participation in public activities during August 2010 and May 2011. In-depth interviews were used to collect information from these bereaved mothers in Sichuan, China.

The case studies reveal two major experiences of bereaved mother whose familial support varies substantially. One major experience is shared by those who had received emotional support from husband (who offered bonding social capital), and were able to get through the psychological pain. Another experience is shared by bereaved mothers who lost their familial relations. Weak social ties (i.e. an NGO which offered bridging social capital) remained the only source of support. Policies can target at the latter group of mothers by helping them to organise themselves into community-based groups and help to relieve their frustration and grief.

These research findings have implications for the development of NGOs, as well as complementary support for community-based bereavement counselling and community care in China.

The paper examines two discourses of bereavement that crystallized simultaneously in Israel as the third millennium began. One is “the economic discourse of bereavement,” with which official organizations dealing with bereavement sought to “free themselves” from the state's directives on entitlement to compensation. Army widows argued that compensation should not depend on their refraining from remarriage, while bereaved parents demanded it would not be contingent on a means test. They urge for liberation from “role demands” and for presenting entitlement to compensation as entitlement to personal rehabilitation, without using it to support pro-establishment behavior or unending interactions with establishment supervision. Those claims express the linkage of bereavement to globalization and individuation, and the desire to rebel against the republican equation conditioning entitlement to welfare on “proper” establishment-compliant behavior. A second discourse is the “hierarchy of bereavement discourse” – which was placed on the agenda together with the first one, and by the same organizations. Unlike the economic discourse, this one acted to replicate the monopoly held by families of IDF dead in the Israeli pantheon, with attempts to bring into it a group of families of civilian bereavement (families of terror victims). The discourse relies on purely republican underpinnings, complying with the spirit of the local–national period. Exploring the two discourses, that were promoted simultaneously by the same agents, assists an analysis of the Israeli discourse of bereavement that results in its definition as “glocal.” This transpires from a review of the literature showing that – even in the face of globalization processes – national–local foundations remained stable. The paper first engages with the concept of glocalization, the ethos of republican citizenship, and, as a facet of it, the identification of social policy as an agent of the social hierarchy, as well as changes in citizenship during globalization. The second section reviews the status of bereaved families, and the central discourses they have promoted in Israeli society. The third and major part contains an analysis of both discourses – the economic discourse of bereavement, and the hierarchy of bereavement discourse. Finally, we attempt to analyze and explain how apparently antithetical discourses took shape in tandem, drawing on the term “glocalism” and the impact of citizenship models.

People with learning disabilities often have to cope with death, dying and bereavement without being fully informed of the circumstances and sometimes without being told that death is imminent or indeed has occurred. This paper explores the issues associated with death and dying from the perspective of people with learning disabilities, and considers proactive ways of working in this sensitive area.