Success in Vancouver, BC, Canada!

The team successfully presented our research paper and findings to a crowded room at 9:00AM on Tuesday, May 10, 2011.  CHI2011 overall was a great experience!

A link to our paper in ACM's digital library. 

I Said Your Name in an Empty Room: Grieving and Continuing Bonds on Facebook

View more presentations from Emily Getty

Vancouver, BC 2011?

The research team wanted to update all of our followers on our progress.  We have tweaked our paper, conducted multiple data manipulations and submitted our paper to CHI 2011 (http://www.chi2011.org/).  We received some very useful feedback from the reviewers and have since submitted our rebuttal.  With all of our hard work and a little luck we hope to participate in the conference which is located in Vancouver, BC this year!

Presentation Update

Thanks for listening! See below for our powerpoint from today's presentation.

Feedback, suggestions, and concerns are greatly appreciated. Please feel free to also email us at uncommonground4500@gmail.com.

Digital Bereavementarticulating the unheard utterances...

A more detailed update to come soon.

Research Update

Uncommon Ground has been hard at work this past month advancing our research on the relationship between grief and Facebook profiles, despite a recent lack of posts. After much deliberation, we have decided to narrow our research to focus specifically on analyzing the differences between language used in pre-death Facebook wall posts with that of post-death posts. Using pre-death posts as our control, we believe (and fervently hope) that the differences between pre- and post-death language use patterns which emerge from our analysis will ultimately shine light on motivations behind posting on deceased Facebook users’ walls. Here is where we currently stand in the research process:

THE DATA

We have collected data from the Facebook walls of twelve deceased Facebook users. Two sets of data exist for each profile: (1) all post-death wall posts, and (2) all pre-death wall posts within one year of the death. Items such as comments, notes, Facebook gifts, quizzes, status updates, and recent activity were deleted and not included in our data analysis as we are interested specifically in language use and not the use of other applications that the social network, Facebook, offers.

THE PREDICTIONS

In a rough sketch of our hypotheses, we defined several categories for comparative analysis, including, but not limited to:

• complexity: we predict post-death wall posts will be more complex (i.e. higher word count, more six-letter words, longer sentences, more punctuation).
• intimacy: we predict post-death wall posts will have greater intimacy.
• positive & negative emotion: we predict post-death posts will use more positive emotion words.
• verb tense: we predict more future tense usage in pre-death posts, and more past tense in post-death posts.
• personal pronouns: we predict post-death posts to show a greater use of personal pronouns.
• other…
• religion: more religion-related language post-death
• spacial terms: more spacial terms post-death
• relative words: more relative words post-death

THE ANALYSES

We are currently in the process of analyzing our data using LIWC, WMATRIX and SPSS. Although we have begun to analyze our first profiles, we need to add results from more profiles to the mix before we can identify patterns.

Additionally, we are finessing the theoretical bases of our research and working on applying several theories (continuing bond, uses and gratifications, back stage/front stage emotion) to language analysis. We would highly appreciate any feedback/suggestions you may have on the theory-language connection or on our research in general.

Within the next week, Uncommon Ground will be working on analyzing all results to begin to identify patterns and form conclusions. Stay tuned for future posts on analyses and theories.

Continuing Bonds Theory

Most of the twentieth century was marked by the idea that people should get past the death of a loved one by detaching themselves emotionally. They could then free the energy they had expended towards the deceased and reinvest it elsewhere. In fact, failure to let go of a relationship towards the deceased was viewed as pathological grief.

Alternatively, Continuing Bond theory revolves around the idea that people maintain a relationship with those they have lost. According to the theory, people have a morphing continued relationship with the dead, finding a changed but still present place to situate the relationship in their lives. This phenomenon is not considered problematic, and in fact “the deceased can provide resources for enriched functioning in the present” (Klass, Silverman, and Nickman).

It is this precisely the presence of a bonds continued through Facebook wall posts that drew us to our research topic. Among other things, we would like to find out if continued bonds have evolved from a discouraged and unhealthy coping behavior to a social norm among Facebook wall-posters. To pinpoint this phenomenon, we will look at the presence of the second person in posts after death. If continued bonds exist, the usage of words like “you” and “your” should not drop significantly. We will also look at the difference between tenses before and after death. Continued use of present and future tense may indicate continued bonds but this assumption may require further investigation.

References

Continuing Bonds New Understandings of Grief. “About the Book.” Edited by Dennis Klass,Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis, 1996.

http://www.routledgeeducation.com/books/Continuing-Bonds-isbn9781560323396

“Continuing Bonds.” Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. http://www.deathreference.com/Ce-Da/Continuing-Bonds.html