Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the Bereaved: A Study of Bereaved Weibo Users

Abstract

The global COVID-19 pandemic may significantly affect the experiences of death and bereavement. This study aimed to learn from recent outbreaks of infectious diseases and further understand their impacts on bereavement. We obtained psychological status scores for 32 individuals bereaved due to COVID-19 and 127 individuals bereaved due to non-COVID-19 causes using the online ecological recognition (OER) approach. Next, a sentiment analysis and independent sample t-test were performed to examine the differences between these two groups. The results indicated that the individuals bereaved due to COVID-19 were more insecure and more preoccupied with the grief of the moment than those bereaved due to non-COVID-19 reasons, while the latter group had higher depression scores than the former group. This study can guide policy-makers and clinical practitioners to provide more targeted and sustainable post-bereavement support for both bereaved groups during the COVID-19 period.

The Effect of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Grief Experiences of Bereaved Relatives: An Overview Review

“…Therefore, relatives of patients with COVID-19 felt more burdened by the pandemic compared to those suffering from other illnesses ( Schloesser et al, 2021 ). Additionally, negative emotions of people bereaved by COVID-19 were found worse than for non-COVID-19 bereaved ( Han et al, 2021 ). COVID-19 grief even corresponds with self-reported worsened depression ( Wang et al, 2021 ).…”

“…With respect to how COVID-19 has changed grief, some actual studies distinguished between the impact of a death caused by COVID-19 and when loved ones died of other causes. Differences between COVID-19 related grief and non-COVID-19 related grief are mentioned ( Chen & Tang, 2021 ; Eisma & Tamminga, 2020 ; Han et al., 2021 ; Motamedzadeh et al, 2021 ; Schloesser et al, 2021 ). First, people who experienced COVID-19 related grief report more severe grief than people who grieved because of natural losses ( Eisma et al, 2021 ).…”

How social media data are being used to research the experience of mourning: A scoping review

“…The most frequently combined approaches to data analysis in the mixed methods records were thematic analysis and descriptive statistical analysis (n = 3; 4%) to interpret and represent the data. In the quantitative records data were analyzed predominantly using sentiment analysis [70,75,84,93,94,[114][115][116]. A large variety of topics were investigated and reported in the included records.…”

“…Two records, both from 2021, reported on research conducted using data from SM related to COVID-19. Han et al [114] explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the bereaved, finding that the bereaved due to COVID-19 were more preoccupied with their grief, but displayed lower depression scores, compared to non-COVID-19 bereaved individuals. Selman et al [71] explored the views and experiences of SM users resulting from knowing that someone they care about died without a family member or friend present and discussed the specific sadness of not being able to say goodbye.…”

“…Of the 18 (20%) [69,71,74,77,79,83,87,90,95,114,117,119,121,131] records that obtained ethics approval, 16 were published after 2012, the year that the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) published updated recommendations for ethical conduct of online research [30]. Sixteen of these 18 records were qualitative in nature, and two were quantitative [114,116]. None of the mixed methods records reported obtaining ethics approval.…”