Between Ritual and Reflection: A Cross-Cultural Study on Women’s Grief and Coping

This article reports on the coping domain of a broader qualitative study exploring how bereaved women in two sociocultural contexts, Türkiye and the United States, navigate loss within cultural and gendered frameworks. Twenty women (10 from each study context) who had experienced a loss within the past two to five years participated in in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Data were analyzed using Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR), involving iterative coding, team consensus, and external auditing. Findings indicated that within the Turkish sample, participants described coping through family and community involvement, condolence practices, personal and collective rituals, and religious practices such as 7th- and 40th-day prayers. These practices were socially embedded and experienced as both supportive and demanding. Within the U.S. sample, participants more often described coping as self-directed and choice-based, including personal reflection, journaling, participation in support groups, and personalized memorial practices, alongside selective use of community or professional resources. Across both study contexts, social support played a central role in coping, though it was organized and accessed through different cultural scripts. Women’s coping was shaped by expectations related to caregiving, emotional responsibility, and social visibility, reflecting the intersection of cultural and gendered norms in bereavement. Rather than treating these patterns as fixed cultural traits, the findings illustrate how coping is negotiated within specific sociocultural conditions and point to the importance of culturally responsive and gender-sensitive approaches in grief counseling.