Trauma in Real Time: Talking and Avoiding Online Conversations About the Death of Princess Diana

Research on talking about trauma as a means of coping typically relies on retrospective self reports. The present study analyzed Internet chat room conversations about the death of Princess Diana for four weeks after her death to begin to map the ways people naturally talk about shared disasters and to seek evidence of social stages of coping. In the first hours and days, people exhibited high levels of personal and emotional responses to the loss of Diana. Linguistic analyses revealed strong evidence of collective shared grief in the first week, with a shift from greater levels of collective language to individual language after the first week. Ratings of the chat room transcripts by judges revealed a shift from largely compassionate to largely hostile comments over the four-week period. Advantages and complications of internet chat rooms as a data source are considered. Trauma in Real Time: Talk and Avoiding Online Conversations About the Death of Princess Diana When a community experiences a shared traumatic experience such as an industrial accident, a natural disaster, or the death of an important person, individuals typically talk with each other about the collective traumatic event. The presence of others who have experienced the same event can provide an automatic support group of people with whom to share thoughts and feelings. In a study of witnesses and survivors of an explosion of a Danish supertanker in 1994, Elklit (1997) found that spending time with coworkers was a primary coping strategy among survivors. The shared experience can even provide a temporary release from social norms that suppress spontaneous talking with strangers. People who survived the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco in October 1989 reported that the experience brought the city ...