14 DAY TRIAL // A new research carried out by Amanda Vicary, a doctoral student at the University of Illinois, along with psychology professor R. Chris Fraley, found that after the campus shootings at Virginia Tech in 2007 and Northern Illinois University in 2008, the students who turned towards social media websites to share their grief, were not affected by these online activities.
This is the first study to make a portrait of student reactions to these events and it also documents the activities that were engaged in order to memorialize and recover from the psychological trauma.
Amanda Vicary said that “after the shooting at Virginia Teach I noticed immediately on my Facebook account that my friends were changing their pictures to memorial ribbons or they were joining groups to support the students at Virginia Tech.
“I started looking (for studies on this topic) and realized that no research had been done looking at how people use the Internet specifically to grieve or investigating how students responded psychologically to these shootings.”
The first survey she conducted was two weeks after the Virginia Tech shootings, when she sent an email to 900 VT students with Facebook accounts asking them to take part at an online survey.
124 of them answered and were assessed for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, before being asked about their activity, online and offline, related to the events.
After the events at Northern Illinois – 10 months after the shootings at Virginia Tech, Vicary carried out a similar survey there, and had 160 responses.
She then combined the results and concluded that 71% of the participants suffered from significant symptoms of depression and 64% of them had PTSD symptoms, two weeks after the shootings at their campuses.
Most of the respondents said that they took part at online memorials, they sent text or instant messages, e-mails, and even posted comments on social networks sites like Facebook.
Almost 90% had joined at least one group concerning the events, on Facebook, over 70% had replaced their profile picture with a Virginia Tech or NIU memorial ribbon, and 28% had posted a message on a memorial website.
Franley said that “it was fascinating from my point of view to see how grief and mourning plays out on the Internet and to learn that it works in a way that's very similar to the way it would if we were doing this outside of a digital framework.
“People were sharing their thoughts and feelings with their friends on Facebook.
“They were attending virtual vigils, joining groups, doing many of the same kinds of things they would do in the non-digital world."
Vicary said that even if most of the students claimed that taking part at online activities related to the shootings made them feel better, there was no evidence of a discernible positive or negative effect.
This study appears in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, ScienceDaily reports.