Death Announcements Research Articles

Taking it to the Grave: Gender, Cultural Capital, and Ethnicity in Turkish Death Announcements

Popularly considered a great equalizer, death and the rituals around it nevertheless accentuate social distinctions. The present study focuses on a sample (N = 2554) of death announcements in a major Turkish daily newspaper (Hürriyet) from 1970 to 2006. Out of the liminal position of Turkish death announcements between obituaries and death notices emerges a large decentralized collection of private decisions responding to death, reflecting attitudes toward gender, ethnic/religious minority status and cultural capital, and echoing the aggregate efforts of privileged groups to maintain a particular self-image. Class closures lead to openings for traditionally under-represented minorities, such as Jewish Turkish citizens and citizens of Greek or Armenian origin. Results reveal that signs of status and power in announcements are largely monopolized by men of Turkish-Muslim origins. Although the changes in the genre-characteristics of death announcements are slow, they correspond to major turning points in Turkish social history.

Communicating messages of solidarity, promotion and pride in death announcements genre in Jordanian newspapers

This study examined various manifestations of the obituary announcement genre in Arabic to see what generic structures are common in a variety of death announcements, and what communicative functions are articulated by their generic components. Drawing on a corpus of 200 announcements randomly collected from two Jordanian daily newspapers, I identified two types of obituary announcements; one communicates a normal death, whereas the other celebrates an unusual death, termed a ‘martyr’s wedding’. I identified nine recurrent components in the death announcements, reflecting the sociocultural norms, practices and beliefs that give rise to these two distinct, yet related, communicative events. Despite observed similarities in their generic components and their overall communicative purpose, the ‘martyr’s wedding’ notices were found to incorporate promotion of the deceased and communicate a feeling of pride and honor on the part of the announcer. I hope that the results of this study will be of help in further understanding sociocultutral factors that influence this communicative event and provide greater insight into the relationship between genres as social communicative events.

Death announcements

Death announcements

A Long-Run View of Israeli Society through the Looking Glass of Mourning Announcements in the Press

This study analyzes death (‘mourning’) announcements published in the Hebrew press in twentieth century Mandatory Palestine and Israel within the context of a decades-long social and cultural transformation. It discusses the process of diffusion of these announcements, the shifting forms of postmortem allocation of prestige, trends of inclusion and exclusion, the variable functions of the announcements and the extent to which public notice of death has been increasingly or decreasingly monitored by friendship, kinship, asso-ciational and occupational networks.

The structure of death announcements: Looking on the bright side of death

The structure of death announcements: Looking on the bright side of death

Editorial data

The event study methodology, which is gaining recognition in the business and marketing disciplines, is a technique used to capture the impact of significant events and announcements at the firm level and country level. Originating from the finance and economics disciplines, and being widely used in the finance literature, the method has recently attracted the attention of business and marketing researchers, particularly in the aftermath of Covid-19, which has adversely affected all kinds of businesses across the world. The event study methodology can be implemented to measure the impact of a major corporate announcement (e.g. new product development) or a significant event on corporate financial performance, profitability, and market valuation over a specific event window, such as a few days (a short window) or a few years (a long window). In this article, we provide a detailed explanation of the step-by-step procedure for implementing the event study methodology in STATA, using Covid-19-related death announcements from the United States, France, Spain, Italy, China, and the United Kingdom. We also provide STATA commands that can be used by researchers when implementing the event study methodology.