My main data were transcripts of focus group discussions and interviews with bereaved adolescent learners. In addition I have drawn not only on data that emerged directly from the present study but also on excerpted or adapted material developed along my journey with bereaved adolescents since 2005. I transcribed the focus group and interview recordings into standard text to allow for analysis and I translated the Afrikaans discussions into English. An isiXhosa-speaking colleague assisted me with the translation of the isiXhosa focus group. He was also very helpful in explaining deeper nuance and indigenous or shorthand terms, for instance the term ‘dabs’ which is short for of oodade bobawo. The literal meaning is ‘the sisters of my father’ but the colloquial use refers to older aunts in the family who are pillars of support.
I pause here to reflect on how translating the discussions affected my colleague. I carried the stories of devastated siblings around in my head for months and for my own well-being, I steeled myself against the emotional pain of it. However the colleague who assisted me with the isiXhosa-English translation found himself overcome by sadness. As the participants described violent deaths, he began weeping at the emotional intensity of what he was listening to. Liamputtong (2007: 82) says that sensitive researchers often neglect to report on the emotional toll of working with vulnerable people because they fear being accused of bias. Yet listening over and over again to anguished accounts can invoke extreme subjective distress as the researcher endures and shares the pain of the participants.
I began analysis by reading the transcripts and coded each line using open coding and in -vivo coding. Coding guidelines developed by Taylor and Gibbs (2010) were helpful. They discuss how codes can be based on behaviours, events, activities, strategies, states, meanings, adaptations, relationships, conditions or constraints, consequences, settings and the researcher’s role in the process of data generation. Initial coding generated over 300 codes indicating anxiety, fear and trauma. These were developed into more focused codes like “panic attacks”, “scared of lifts”, “scared of showering”, and “worried about being blamed for the death” and then grouped into a category I provisionally called “anxiety”. A snapshot of how the analysis process is grounded in the data is shown in Figure 1 where the successive refining of codes built up a tentative analytic category of “Anxiety”.
Figure 1: Development of the category “Anxiety”
Tentative Category : ANXIETY
Controlling Behaviour/ Phobias Fear of Self and others dying
Baths instead of showering
now
Can only bath in lukewarm water since Won’t go in a lift now I wonder who’s going to be next
People just get snatched out my life I never thought about death before Plans routes in advance Terrified of tunnels now Wont drive at month end anymore My parents couldn’t handle this again I’m scared to turn 18 coz that’s how old he was
you really think about dying for the 1st time Can’t go to shopping centre alone now Keeps three emergency numbers on phone now Plans carefully so nothing bad can happen Logically I know it won’t happen to me but … I could die tomorrow that’s reality for me now Well at least I’m not going to die then!
Selected examples of raw codes
The emphasis on words like now, and before indicates that anxiety and fear developed as a direct consequence of their sibling’s death. Data in the emergent category “Anxiety” also provided clues for possible sub-categories such as “Fear of self and others dying”. I looked at literature on anxiety and wrote memos to clarify my thoughts on what had emerged. To gauge how important categories were to my participants, I combed my data again and picked up on absolute statements containing words like “very”, “really” and “most of all”. I looked at the use of intense verbs: words like “hate” and “destroy” and I noted extreme adjectives like: “hysterical” and “petrified”.
Line-by-line coding forced me to stay close to the data and helped me to compare data with data. Charmaz (2006: 52) notes that coding every line it is an enormously useful tool because it helps identify implicit concerns as well as explicit statements and ideas will occur to you that may escape your attention if you read for a general thematic analysis of qualitative data. Figure 2 provides a snapshot of the line-by-line coding process which sparked the idea that becoming older than the sibling who died could be a troubling experience for surviving brothers and sisters. Thus I paid more attention to the event of a sibling reaching a birthday which made them the same age or older than their sibling was at death. Then I compared incident to incident. Charmaz (2006: 53) explains that this helps your ideas to take hold and gives you clues to follow.
Focused code Focused code
Figure 2: Coding: Line-by-line
Simultaneous collapse of family and loss of sibling
Connected to sibling
Sibling who died was the most dependable of all his siblings Strong connection to sibling Looked up to sibling
Life is different since the death Hierarchy changed
Forced into new role First experience of death Weird being older than brother
Excerpt 1 Rob, 22 who was in high school when his older
brother died
The collapse of our family was bad and for me I mean … at that stage with Anthony, well he was the only brother I felt I could actually depend on, you know. I was very connected to him and I looked up to him a lot. I mean I could rely on him more than I could on anybody else. It’s definitely different because of him dying. Particularly me kind of being placed in the older brother sort of role. Ja, so the first person I actually personally knew who died was Anthony. And what’s weird is being older than him because no matter how old I am I always, when I think of him, I think of him as a person older than me...even though I think of him as the same age as what he was but I still kind of picture him as older than me.
Figure 3 shows an excerpt from an incident-to-incident comparison of how teenagers feel about becoming older than the sibling who died. This coding exercise uncovered more concepts for examination like the impact of multiple losses and fears of dying.
Figure 3: Coding: Incident-to-Incident Both died at same age
Scared of who will die next Afraid to turn same age as sibling who died
Weird being the same age as sibling who died
Fears overtaking brother’s age Regrets he did not get to experience being older
Excerpt 1
And my boyfriend had turned seventeen so that freaked me out and both of them died when they were seventeen, well close to eighteen. And next year I’ll be seventeen (Laughs ruefully) I’ll wait and see how that goes.
Excerpt 2
And now I’m actually seventeen, the same age as my brother was when he died and that’s kind of weird because I am the youngest of all of my brothers.
Excerpt 3
I was afraid to turn eighteen because then I would be the same age as him. It’s very difficult for me and it’s always in the back of my mind that he never got to this point.