Death Memories & Meaning Making: The Challenges of Qualitative Coding
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Death Memories & Meaning Making: The Challenges of Qualitative Coding
Everyone will experience the death of a loved one. Everyone will have to come to terms with dying, death, and bereavement. Despite this, most people actively avoid thinking about death. The current study examined death memory narratives. The sample included 404 University of North Carolina Wilmington students and their family members, ages 18-88. Participants were asked to share a specific memory about a death or dying-related experience that they were personally involved in and that was meaningful to them (MacKay & Bluck, 2010). The presence or absence of meaning making was assessed by qualitative content-coding. Memory narratives were coded by two independent raters using the meaning making coding scheme developed by MacKay and Bluck (2010). This coding scheme included the following five categories: benefit-finding, responsibility assignment, imbuing experience with religious significance, imbuing experience with supernatural significance, and personal growth. Qualitative analyses revealed that participants reported a wide variety of very personal and meaningful death memories. Further, 165 participants used at least one meaning-making strategy, 180 did not. Individual narratives indicated varying levels of meaning making:
Lack of meaning Making:
When I was told my mother had died, I was home after leaving her side at the emergency room. I felt intense guilt that I had left and did not stay with her. I was in denial that she could die.
Benefit Finding:
My great grandmother passed away at 100 years old when I was 11 years old. She passed peacefully in her sleep…I was happy to think that she would be reunited with her husband.
Death memory narratives provide individuals a safe and acceptable method to talk about death. Further, examining the content of personal and meaningful death memories may be a useful way of identifying individuals who are struggling with grief.
Everyone will experience the death of a loved one. The current study examined death memory narratives. Participants (n=404) shared a specific memory about a death or dying-related experience that they were personally involved in and that was meaningful to them. Meaning-making was assessed by qualitative content-coding using five categories: benefit-finding, responsibility assignment, imbuing experience with religious significance, imbuing experience with supernatural significance, and personal growth. Participants reported a wide variety of death memories. Further, 165 participants used at least one meaning-making strategy. Examining the content of death memories is a useful way of identifying individuals who are struggling with grief.
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