Giving Voice to Student Grief: Using Community-based Participatory Research to Develop and Pilot a Translational Storytelling Intervention for Bereaved College Students

The purpose of this dissertation was to employ community-based participatory research (CBPR, Wallerstein et al., 2018) methods to attend to a pressing issue in the community. In partnership with one local grief center, we identified the need for enhanced grief support for current emerging adult undergraduate students in our area. Nearly 50% of U.S. emerging adults enrolled in four-year residential universities experience the death of an important figure (Cox et al., 2015; Cupit et al., 2021), at a time when they are developing important facets of their narrative identity. Without the coherence and meaning structures provided by narrative identity, students struggle to cope with bereavement. Few interventions have been designed to attend to the perspectives of these students themselves, including their needs to (re)story their grief (Spiccia et al., 2023). In the current study, I argue that merging CBPR methods and communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM, Koenig Kellas, 2018, 2022) theory’s retrospective and translational storytelling heuristics is one fruitful way to address the important gap in scholarship and practice. Accordingly, we conducted three consecutive phases of data collection and analysis that employed the joint theoretical-methodological approach to engage in 31 needs assessment narrative interviews that illuminated ten primary needs of grieving students (Phase 1), gather input from a Community Advisory Board of students and other community members on these findings to co-design (Phase 2), and pilot test a translational storytelling intervention (Phase 3) to enhance participant health and well-being. The intervention findings revealed benefits including connection, learning about self and others, practical sense-making and communication tools, and a comfortable environment. Drawbacks and proposed changes to the intervention included more time and space for connection and reflection on their grief experiences and covering additional topics relevant to their bereavement as college students. I discuss theoretical and practical implications across each phase, including the value of building from multiple CNSM theory heuristics, significance of merging CBPR and CNSM frameworks, gendered and cultural aspects of investigating of grief and storytelling in emerging adult students, and what university students, faculty, administrators, and communities at large can do with these findings. Advisor: Jody Koenig Kellas