CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 402Grief, Bereavement, and Mental HealthDeath, Funerary Practices, and MourningMemory, History, Trauma, Identity

A social constructionist account of grief: loss and the narration of meaning.

Neimeyer, Robert A., Klass, Dennis, Dennis, Michael Robert·2014·Death Studies
DOI 10.1080/07481187.2014.913454
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

In contrast to dominant Western conceptions of bereavement in largely intrapsychic terms, the authors argue that grief or mourning is not primarily an interior process, but rather one that is intricately social, as the bereaved commonly seek meaning in this unsought transition in not only personal and familial, but also broader community and even cultural spheres. The authors therefore advocate a social constructionist model of grieving in which the narrative processes by which meanings are found, appropriated, or assembled occur at least as fully between people as within them. In this view, mourning is a situated interpretive and communicative activity charged with establishing the meaning of the deceased's life and death, as well as the postdeath status of the bereaved within the broader community concerned with the loss. They describe this multilevel phenomenon drawing first on psychological research on individual self-narratives that organize life experience into plot structures that display some level of consistency over time, whose viability is then negotiated in the intimate interpersonal domain of family and close associates. Second, they explore public communication, including eulogies, grief accounts in popular literature, and elegies. All of these discourses construct the identity of the deceased as he or she was, and as she or he is now in the individual and communal continuing bonds with the deceased. Finally, they consider different cultural contexts to see how expressions of grief are policed to ensure their coherence with the prevailing social and political order. That is, the meanings people find through the situated interpretive and communicative activity that is grieving must either be congruent with the meanings that undergird the larger context or represent an active form of resistance against them.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1080/07481187.2014.913454

Cites

61 of 61 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Sudden deaths like suicides are shocking and compel individuals to make sense of them as part of bereavement.

    “In short, Robert Neimeyer and his many collaborators have demonstrated that sudden deaths, like suicides, are shocking and compel individuals to make sense of them, to sift through available meanings as part of the bereavement process (Gillies and Neimeyer, 2006; Neimeyer et al., 2014).”

    From The Social Roots of Suicide: Theorizing How the External Social World Matters to Suicide and Suicide Prevention (2021) · cites this paper as Neimeyer et al., 2014

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Neimeyer, R. A., Klass, D., & Dennis, M. R.
Affiliations
  • University of Memphis (US)
  • Emporia State University (US)
Corresponding author
Neimeyer, Robert A.
ORCID
Venue
Death Studies
Publisher
Informa UK Limited
Published
2014-05-21
Volume
38
Issue
8
Pages
485-498
ISSN
  • 0748-1187 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-7683
DOI
10.1080/07481187.2014.913454
OpenAlex
W2032653188
Cited by
402
References
61
Citations by year
2026: 56 · 2025: 58 · 2024: 47 · 2023: 27 · 2022: 36 · 2021: 40 · 2020: 32 · 2019: 34 · 2018: 25 · 2017: 21 · 2016: 16 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 1
FWCI
18.09
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Death Studies (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Clinical Psychology › Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Philosophy › Memory, History, Trauma, Identity
Keywords
grief, mourning, social constructionism, bereavement, meaning-making, narrative, self-narrative, funeral oration, elegy, resistance, interpersonal communication, death and dying
MeSH terms
Adaptation, Psychological, Attitude to Death, Grief, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Psychological Theory, Social Perception, Social Support, Survivors, Narration

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review