Poems and narratives from 180 people were collected through online searches for the word “loneliness”.  It was possible that a person could have had more than one poem or narrative in the analysis but the unit of analysis was limited to the person rather than the poem or narrative.

Procedure

The poems and narratives collected online were used to provide information about the levels of loneliness, the subjective experiences of loneliness, and coping strategies of the website creator.  Poems and narratives were collected from personal homepages/websites.  Personal websites means that the website is not associated with a business, company or any other institution.  The websites are publicly available and are usually geared towards strangers viewing them (as reflected, for example, in the use of guest books).  The websites were limited to specific web hosts, namely Tripod, Angelfire and Geocities.  The web hosting provided by these companies is free and can be utilized by anyone who has access to the Internet.  They contain computer programs that can assist persons interested in putting up a website but don’t know how to (e.g., knowledge of HTML is not required).  This ensured that the participant base was not unnecessarily limited.

To find and collect loneliness poems, searches were conducted on the specific web host domains and the search results were viewed sequentially to obtain poems and narratives.  While the collection was not random, the researcher did not selectively choose poems either.  Only the following search results were excluded: addresses of websites that no longer existed, results that entailed things other than poems (e.g., pictures about loneliness) and results that referred to web pages with unoriginal material (that is material not created by the website maker).  Once a web page containing what was perceived to be an original loneliness poems or narrative (most of these pages mentioned that the website creator was the author of the poem/narrative), they were copied and collected, along with the URL of the website.  Each author was assigned a unique number, and all poems obtained from that website were assigned that number.

Coding.

            Three major themes were coded in these poems and narratives: the cause of loneliness, the experiences/descriptions of loneliness, and coping strategies used.  The researcher did all coding.  Coding took place in two parts.  The first part, involved open coding, whereby poems and narratives were analyzed and common themes and descriptions that emerged were assigned a code.  A later refinement of codes was done through progressive readings to produce a list of representative and independent codes.  Throughout the coding process, themes that were associated around causes, descriptions, and ways of coping with loneliness were coded.  The categories mentioned in Objective 5 were the established codes derived from the poems and narratives.  In order to properly identify categories in the poems and narratives, a description of each category was formed, along with a collection of common examples of the category.  The end result was a list of inductively derived categories of causes of loneliness, descriptions of loneliness and coping strategies, along with a description of each category and some common examples found in the poems and narratives (see Table 10).

            The second part of the coding involved event coding.  If a poem or narrative possessed one or more of the derived categories, a note was made in the codebook for that poem or narrative of the presence of all the categories found.  Hence it was possible for one poem or narrative to be coded under several categories.  The code merely represented the presence or absence of that category for each poem or narrative.  Because of this coding system, it was possible to obtain the frequency of each category over all 180 poems and narratives.