Abstract: Experiencing the grief caused by losing a loved one is fundamental to human experience, with an estimated 1 out of 10 of an organization’s workforce facing the death of a spouse annually (McGuinness, 2007). Grief occurs during the response to this “loss in all of its totality – including its physical, emotional, cognitive, behavioral and spiritual manifestations – and as a natural and normal reaction to loss" (Hall, 2014, p. 7). According to the US Census Bureau, there were 11.61 million women and 3.4 million men living in the United States who lost a spouse in 2021 (Gurrentz, & Mayol-Garcia, 2021). The death of a spouse can significantly impact a person's ability to function both personally and professionally, making it unrealistic to expect an employee to leave their grief out of the workplace (Pitimson, 2021). Both absenteeism and presenteeism, i.e., being present from work but completing tasks at a lower level than normal, can decrease productivity, directly impacting the efficiency of an organization (Tarro et al., 2020).
The decision to return to work after leave due to the death of a spouse is often dictated by company policy (e.g., time-constrained leave), a desire to find comfort in the return to routine, or a combination of both (Pitimson, 2021). When returning to work, it is incumbent on workplaces to assist those returning to work in their assigned tasks (Wilson et al., 2020). Given the relevance and importance of this for those in orrganziations responsible for the support and development of individuals, namely Human Resource and Human Resource Development (HRD) professionals, the purpose of this study is to understand the experiences of widows returning to work after losing a spouse. This study is significant because if more could be understood about the lived experiences of women returning to work after losing a spouse, organizations in general and HRD professionals in particular can be better informed on how to best support them in a way that would benefit both the widows and the organization as a whole.
This work-in-progress poster is guided by the following research question: How do widows describe their experience of returning to work after losing their spouse? The methodology for this study is qualitative content analysis, a strategy that provides an "in-depth, socio-contextual and detailed description and interpretation of the research topic" (Vaismoradi et al., 2016, p. 101). This study analyzes Facebook posts made by widows about their careers after becoming a widow found in three private Facebook support groups. Research shows that online support groups on social media platforms like Facebook have grown significantly in popularity for offering a low-cost opportunity to facilitate widow-to-widow support (Hartig & Viola, 2016; Robinson & Pond, 2019). With social media usage growing exponentially (Pew Research Center, 2021), there is no shortage of support groups available to those in need, with a search of Facebook using the keyword "widow" resulting in hundreds of options with a diverse group of titles, from "Young, Widowed, and Dating" with 9,000 members to "Late Night Widow and Widowers" with over 20,000 members. The perceived anonymity within social media support groups can contribute to participants' genuine interactions and a greater level of self-disclosure when compared to in-person support groups (Campbell et al., 2001). Because of the vast number of women experiencing this type of lost, this study will only focus on widows and not also widowers.
This study adopts a summative approach to qualitative content analysis, allowing the point of entry into the whole text's meaning through keywords found in the context being studied (Rapport, 2010). In this study, the main keywords being searched via Facebook search mechanism in each private Facebook group are "job," "career," and "work." Open coding is used to identify critical ideas to create conceptual categories intuitively. Next, these initial codes are grouped via axial coding, relating the initial codes to each other (Marshall et al., 2022). Findings and implications for HRD research, policy, and practice will be presented, including suggestions for the next steps for the research of this topic.
