Blogging as a response to natural disaster: Its functions and blogger's cognitive appraisal, coping and psychological resources as seen in blog entries

• Main Author: Tirazona, Maria Andrea Saenz
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2012
• Subjects: Blogs; Blogs—Psychological aspects; Disasters—Blogs; Psychology
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4522; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11360&context=etd_masteral
• Institution: De La Salle University

Online journaling, or blogging as commonly known, offers its user a venue where one is free to express thoughts and emotions while offering opportunities for feedback and social connection from its readers. Given the body of literature that explored writing as a therapeutic process, this study looked at the function of blogging in response to natural disaster and explored the bloggers cognitive appraisal, coping and psychological resources as seen through their blog entries. Content analysis of 67 blog entries written by 15 Filipino bloggers about their experience of Typhoon Ondoy showed that blogging served four important functions: as a means of journaling, to disseminate information, as a medium of coping, and as a means to build discussion. In their blog entries, it was seen that while the bloggers cognitively appraised the disaster as a traumatic and horrific event, it was manageable and temporary. The disaster further served as a reminder that allowed people to change and be proactive in the face of natural disasters. The bloggers also wrote about both problem-focused and emotion-focused coping strategies that enabled them to respond to their experience of disaster through giving them a venue to express release tension, express their emotions freely and help them heal from the trauma they experienced. Their entries also gave evidence to important psychological resources such as having personal character strengths and the availability of social support contributed to their ability to adapt to their experience of natural disaster. An important finding in this study is that for the bloggers, helping others in need was important. In the blog entries they wrote, they called for bayanihan which suggests that through blogging, pakikipagkapwa, pakikisama and pakikiramay takes on a new virtual dimension.