Grieving under conditions of restrictive rituals : resisting common predictions and defying reductive narratives
(2026)
Files
ManuscritthèseCamilleBoeversanschapitresrestreints.pdf
Open Access - Adobe PDF
- 2.83 MB
ManuscritthèseBoeverChapitre3.pdf
Closed Access - Adobe PDF
- 593.08 KB
ManuscritthèseBoeverChapitre5.pdf
Closed Access - Adobe PDF
- 615.51 KB
ManuscritthèseBoeverChapitre62.pdf
Closed Access - Adobe PDF
- 599.44 KB
Details
- Authors
- Supervisors
- Zech, Emmanuelle
- Abstract
- The COVID-19 pandemic and the measures taken to contain it have profoundly altered the social and funeral conditions surrounding end-of-life care and death. how social and funeral restrictions have shaped the experiences and trajectories of grief among people who lost a significant other during this period. The methodology used in this thesis, described in Chapter 1, combined mixed approaches. A longitudinal study was conducted among 472 people who had lost a significant person in Belgium between March 2020 and January 2022. This study included three repeated measurements using questionnaires. Secondly, a qualitative interview study provided further insight into the experiences of 12 participants from the questionnaire study. The findings in this thesis show how difficult it is to identify a uniform impact of social and funeral restrictions on grief reactions (chapter 2), given the wide variety of experiences and adjustments made by bereaved individuals. The pandemic has profoundly disrupted the benchmarks for “the right thing to do” when a relative dies (chapter 3), generating, for some, the possibility of reinventing practices, and for others, paradoxical injunctions, value conflicts, and experiences of “grieving the ideal goodbye” (chapter 4). The way in which this has affected their grief varies from person to person, depending on how the circumstances were subjectively perceived (chapter 5), and the broader meaning given to the experience. Ultimately, experiences of grief coexist with experiences of growth that evolve over time along various trajectories, depending on factors extending beyond the immediate context (chapter 6). Beyond the specific context in which these data were collected, the findings of this thesis contribute to refining theoretical understandings of grief and encourage researchers and practitioners to consider grief as an idiosyncratic, multidimensional, evolving, and contextual experience.
- Affiliations
UCLouvain SSH/IPSY - Psychological Sciences Research Institute
Citations
Boever, C. (2026). Grieving under conditions of restrictive rituals : resisting common predictions and defying reductive narratives. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/274431