#Preeclampsiasurvivor and symbolic interactionism in women's maternal health

A hypertensive disorder of pregnancy and leading cause of maternal mortality worldwide, preeclampsia (PE) impacts approximately one in 25 pregnancies. Biomedical researchers continue to look for concrete causes and effective treatments for PE, but the experience of PE-the personal and socially constructed meanings surrounding the condition-remains under-researched. Using a symbolic interactionism approach, we examined Instagram posts accompanying the #preeclampsiasurvivor hashtag during Preeclampsia Awareness Month. Themes emerging from interpretive analysis of 98 posts (160 images) included the role of PE in redefining a woman's relationship to her body, reifying a woman's connection to her child, and illuminating the transitive aspects of a childbearing woman's identity. Additionally, PE survivors turned to Instagram to speak to an imagined, 'generalized sisterhood' of women sharing a common set of experiences. Our study is unique in its examination of the lived experiences of PE survivors.

‘If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry’: Emotional labour, reflexivity and ethics-as-practice in a qualitative fieldwork context

This article takes Guillemin and Gillam’s distinction between ‘procedural ethics’ and ‘ethics in practice’ as a point of departure and return for reflecting critically on a recently completed doctoral research project about political violence and terrorism. It provides an overview of the study before offering some instructive vignettes to show how ethical decision-making processes engaged with ‘in the field’ were an extension of more everyday and mundane reasoning than we may typically associate with such quintessentially ‘sensitive research’. As the final section of this article argues, it is this everyday and mundane quality to ethical reasoning which is sometimes obscured in formal accounts of ‘reflexivity’. It is hoped that this article is useful for scholars interested in the ethics and emotional practices of qualitative inquiry, as well as those researching serious violence and bereavement.

To grieve or not to grieve (online)? Interactions with deceased Facebook friends

Besides seeking social support, connecting with bereaved others, and maintaining relationships with the deceased, bereaved Facebook users may express their grief on Facebook to reduce their death anxiety. Notably, research has not yet explored the psychological outcomes of expressing grief on Facebook. This study undertook quantitative analysis of survey data from an initial community sample of 409 bereaved Facebook users (77.8% survey completion rate, n = 312; M_age = 34.46, SD = 12.38; 90% women) to ascertain whether expressions of grief on Facebook had negative psychological outcomes, and whether terror management theory (TMT) provided an appropriate lens for understanding Facebook grief expressions (FBGE). The aims of this study were three-fold: to clarify rates at which Facebook profiles of deceased users are deactivated, memorialized, unchanged, or managed; frequency and types of FBGE; and prevalence of/visitation to commemorative groups. Results-though insufficient to support TMT as an explanatory theoretical framework for FBGE-indicated that individuals who participated in FBGE reported higher anxiety and stress compared to bereaved individuals who did not express their grief on Facebook. Results provide a useful starting point for future research regarding online grieving behaviors and psychological wellbeing.