Discursive, Communal, and Individual Coping Strategies: How U.S. Adults Co-constructed Coping During Preliminary COVID-19 Stressors.

This interpretive research study explores U.S. adults' lived experiences during the beginning months of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Participants (N= 44), recruited from a convenience sample of U.S. adults, engaged in in-depth semi-structured interviews or focus groups. Through an iterative analysis of participants' experiences and the theoretical model of communal coping (TMCC), the authors identified three convergent stressors (i.e., isolation, uncertainty, conflict) and several coping strategies related to participants' stressor appraisal (i.e., individual or joint) and action orientation (i.e., individual or joint). Based on these findings, this study offers the novel theoretical concept of Discursive coping and proposes a model for how this perspective might be integrated with current theorizing about individual and communal coping. Implications for communal coping and discursive theory are discussed as well as practical recommendations for public health messaging.

Collective Emotion During Collective Trauma: A Metaphor Analysis of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This study provides insight into lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Participant metaphors of the pandemic were collected by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews (N = 44). Participants were asked to compare the pandemic with an animal and with a color, and to provide contextual sensemaking about their metaphors. A metaphor analysis revealed four convergent mental models of participants' pandemic experiences (i.e., uncertainty, danger, grotesque, and misery) as well as four primary emotions associated with those mental models (i.e., grief, disgust, anger, and fear). Through metaphor, participants were able to articulate deeply felt, implicit emotions about their pandemic experiences that were otherwise obscured and undiscussable. Theoretical and practical implications of these collective mental models and associated collective emotions related to the unprecedented collective trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.

Resisting Corporeal Boundaries in Body Work and Knowledge Work.

This essay summarizes two worker injury narratives: (a) one in a bodywork context and (b) the other in a knowledge work context. Framed by these narratives, the essay integrates unobtrusive control theory with recent research on organizational health and wellness Discourses1. The author highlights how the material quality of corporeal resistance may be a conduit for change in unobtrusive organizational contexts. The essay concludes with practical recommendations for workers to question hidden, problematic, work norms as well as maintain authentic health and wellness as an organizational member.

Labeling Avoidance in Healthcare Decision-Making: How Stakeholders Make Sense of Concussion Events through Sport Narratives.

This study documents how cultural sport narratives influence athletic team member sensemaking during concussion events. Analysis of macro-level sport culture narratives and interviews (N = 93) with collegiate athletes and athletic trainers from eleven large universities within the United States revealed that participants utilized five cultural sport narratives when making sense of a concussion event (i.e., Play-through-pain, Commodification, Big leagues, Masculine-Warrior, and Need-for-safety). These narratives functioned in two specific ways as athletic team members made sense of concussion events (i.e., as extracted cues and identity defenses). The study presents the concept of labeling avoidance (e.g., avoiding a formal concussion diagnosis) to describe how athletes retrospectively rationalized their non-disclosure of a severe head impact. Theoretical and practical implications of the study findings are discussed.

The Structuration of Community-Based Mental Health Care: A Duality Analysis of a Volunteer Group's Local Agency.

Using a lens of structuration theory, this study highlights the ways that specific structures within the current community-based model of mental health care might enable and constrain individuals and families living with mental illness. Through a case study of a volunteer mental illness advocacy group, the authors employed a duality analysis on a variety of data collected from the case (i.e., interviews, organizational documents, and community health care data). Findings indicate that while group members encountered structural barriers to their organizational mission, they also used communicative agency creatively and collectively to (re)create structures within the current community-based model of mental health care. Member agency is examined in relation to perceived structural influence. Theoretical and practical applications of the findings are discussed.