Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Linguistic, Personological Features, and Collocations of the Doka & Martin Grieving Style Continuum

Public Deposited

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/nc580v19x

Descriptions

Attribute NameValues
Creator
Abstract
  • Research on grief has been studied for nearly a century to understand its many facets, expressiveness, and timing. In the field of counseling, many changes in theories, models, and the lenses through which loss is responded to have been accomplished. However, one constant in the U.S. culture is that definitions and characteristics of grief have been normalized, leading society and practitioners to deem what response to a loss is appropriate versus what is not. In the counseling field, where language is paramount to understanding the extent of one’s suffering, corpus linguistics studies related to grief are lacking. This study is the first of its kind to analyze language use among a grief style continuum and further challenge the normalization of one response to loss. This dissertation research project has two arms: A and B. In Arm A, the linguistic processes of both grief styles are analyzed, including how one grief style is different from the other using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), a form of topic modeling. For this arm, four research questions were developed. These questions were: (a) What is the level of use of linguistic processes known to be related to grief? (b) What is the level of use of linguistic processes known to be related to grief? (c) What constellations of linguistic processes best differentiate intuitive from instrumental grievers? and (d) What linguistic properties best characterize a two-topic model? Results showed that there is a statistically significant difference in present-tense language for the intuitive griever. Using LDA, it was determined that the language in intuitive grief vignettes is slightly more distinguishable than in instrumental, and uniquely, do not contain high rates of words associated with death and time. Research Arm B involved an examination of word keyness and collocates for each grief style. The two research questions for this arm were: (a) In terms of keyness, what are the top five words for each grief style? and (b) For each grief style, what were the collocates of the word with the strongest keyness? Regarding keyness findings, “death” was shown among instrumental grievers, but not among intuitive grievers. “Felt” was intuitive grievers’ strongest collocate. A surprising finding among the instrumental corpora were collocates of the word stem cry* for the node “like.” The aforementioned results are affective, qualities that are subtle among the cognitive characteristics pertaining to instrumental grief. These results show that besides what is known about difference in experiences, expression, and primary adaptive strategies, there are differences in language use among the two grief styles. Both studies have implications for how counselors respond to grieving clients and offer new avenues for research in this area of grief and loss.
License
Resource Type
Date Issued
Degree Level
Degree Name
Degree Field
Degree Grantor
Commencement Year
Advisor
Committee Member
Academic Affiliation
Rights Statement
Publisher
Peer Reviewed
Language

Relationships

Parents:

This work has no parents.

In Collection:

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details GeislerJamesG2021.pdf 2021-05-11 Public Download