Researching Grief: Cultural, Relational, and Individual Possibilities

ABSTRACT

This review of the author’s writings on grief focuses on cross-cultural research, research with 19th-century diaries, and qualitative interview studies of couples and families. The cross-cultural studies show that there are strong cultural differences in how people grieve. The diary data show that some people cycle into and out of intense grieving, even for years after a death, and the cycling is governed partly by what they do to control emotions and what they encounter that reminds them of their loss. The interview studies make clear that grieving is, for many people, relational, so looking only at individual grieving we miss much of the relational dynamics that are central to the experience of grieving for many people.

KEYWORDS:

• African Americans
• couples
• culture
• family systems
• grief
• mourning

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul C. Rosenblatt

Paul C. Rosenblatt has a PhD in Psychology and is Professor Emeritus of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota. He has published 14 books and 150 journal articles and chapters in edited scholarly books. He loves teaching and has received campus and national teaching awards. He is currently researching love letters, writing about phenomena the grief field may be overlooking, writing about what may not usually be said in methods sections of reports of collaborative research, and exploring using fiction and memoirs as vehicles for conveying insights about the assumptive system of social science researchers and families.