Bloggning som copingstrategi : Änglamammors användning av copingstrategier i bloggtexter

Sammanfattning: The aim of my work was to analyze how three bloggers, who lost a child to sud- den infant death syndrome SIDS, used different rituals and coping strategies in their blogs. I analyzed how these mothers, through blogging on the Internet, ex- press their grief, what kind of rituals they have performed in the grieving process, and whether these rituals can be seen as part of a coping strategy to deal with the grief. My analysis was based on a deductive approach with the help of the coping theory which MarieAnne Ekedahls (2001) used in her research and the theories about ritualization which Carin Åblad Lundström (2010) used in her. In my analy- sis, I made a transverse text analysis using the analysis program Open Code. I used Open Code to structure and upload my material, and analyzed it along Eke- dahls (2001) coping theory and Åblad Lundström (2010) theories about ritualiza- tions as a coping strategy when dealing with SIDS. The essay was divided into three different parts. Part I was based on Ekedahls (2001) coping model to analyze how the bloggers produce various coping strate- gies in their texts. The conclusion was that all coping strategies were prominent in the blogs. Part II, in which Åblad Lundström’s (2010) model was used, estab- lished that ritualization was useful when dealing with death. The rituals were thus also the prominent component in all of the three blogs on a religious, private and social level, and both in private and in public. Finally, these two theories were combined in Part III, where it was possible to conclude that the appropriate rituals could be connected with one or more of the designed coping strategies. Coping strategies involve either preserving or reconstructing methods and ways of mov- ing on, while rituals result in a contact with the individual's inner or outer worlds. In this way, it was possible to see rituals as a coping strategy. Both coping strate- gies and rituals were combined, so none of the bloggers used only one strategy or ritual, but used many of them when dealing with death.