“He Wasn’t Supposed to Die:” How College Students Coping with Peer Loss Differ from Other Groups of Grievers
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2024
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Haverford College. Department of Sociology
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Thesis
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Award
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eng
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Open access
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Abstract
The existing sociological literature's failure to consider peer loss among young adults has left gaps in support systems and programming that could help affected individuals process their losses. I aim to fill this gap. I used the characterizations of grief that most frequently showed up in the literature such as religion’s role in grief and gendered grieving, and adapted them to modern young populations, demonstrating where the theories aligned with my respondents’ responses and where theories failed to capture their experiences. Additionally, I identified two grief frameworks highly relevant to young grievers, but somewhat underrepresented in the literature: substance use and the role of institutional support for bereaved college students. Given that grief is a highly individualized experience, there wasn’t one uniform response among respondents, but there were patterns in their grief responses that crucially differed from or added to the existing grief literature in significant ways. I argue that existing literature is important for understanding why college students’ grief reactions may arise, but that it fails to explain how they are grieving and for what reasons. In my thesis, I demonstrate how young adults suffering from peer loss grieve differently from the broader population through four subtopics: religion’s role in grief, the lack of institutional support, substance usage, and gendered expressions of grieving.