Wan-Jou She
Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, New York, United States
Prolong Grief Disorder (PGD) is a condition in which mourners are stuck in the grief process for a prolonged period and continue to suffer from an intense, mal-adaptive level of grief. Despite the increased popularity of virtual mourning practices, and subsequently the emergence of HCI research in this area, there is little research looking into how continuing bonds maintained digitally promote or impede bereavement adjustment. Through a one-month diary study and in-depth interviews with 17 participants who recently lost their loved ones, we identified four broad mechanisms of how grievers engage in what we called "backstage" grieving (as opposed to bereavement through digital public space like social media). We further discuss how this personal and private grieving is important in maintaining emotional well-being hence avoiding developing PGD, as well as possible design opportunities and challenges for future digital tools to support grieving.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445336
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)