Meaning-making in bereavement and grief

Abstract

The focus on meaning-making in loss (Neimeyer, 2001) reflects increasing use of qualitative methods to study how individuals and groups experience bereavement. Adopting a relativist, constructivist ontology, a qualitative lens foregrounds the variety of ways people interpret and find meaning within the everyday flow of events, speech and behaviour, or discursive activity, through which we define and structure our social reality (Berger & Luckman, 1967). In analysing qualitative data we come to appreciate the complex relationship between individual and social processes, the human capacity for agency in difficult situations, and how we act on the basis of meaning (Strauss & Corbin, 1998, p. 9). This approach represents a shift from meaning-making based on internal, psychological compulsion to meaning as socially and culturally shaped. The analytic task then becomes one of discovering the ‘strange’ in the familiar to gain an appreciation of how ‘common sense’ experiences are not as self-evident as they may seem, but have been shaped by cultural meaning systems. While providing a methodological lens to study how individuals engage with specific types of loss, meaningmaking in bereavement is also a topic of investigation, which has been theorised as central to grieving (Neimeyer 2001; Park, 2010). For example, Niemeyer’s ‘meaningreconstruction’, or the attempt to reaffirm a world of meaning threatened by loss, includes sense-making, benefit finding and identity change (Gillies & Neimeyer, 2006). Park’s meaning-making model describes how meaning is lost, searched for and found, the outcome being meanings made. This model has sought to bridge the gap between a more ‘global sense of meaning’ in life and a ‘situational sense of meaning’ disrupted by loss. Further, given meaningmaking’s socio-cultural shaping, its study in diverse contexts can illuminate different cultural responses to contemporary societal conditions and the issues these raise for the experience of death and loss. Yet, the focus on cultural diversity both within and between cultures has been limited, definitions of meaning-making in bereavement tending to uncritically assume mainstream western perspectives. Of the relatively few studies showing cultural sensitivity I review three, which capture the complex interplay of situational and global, micro and macro, individual and cultural dimensions to extend our understanding of meaning-making in loss.