“Sorry You Had to Go Through That”

Abstract

Social suffering is distress engendered by cultural, social, and political forces. Responses to stories of such suffering serve as rejoinders in an identity negotiation process and can foster either healing or compounded distress—for both individuals and communities alike. Because there is no published study (to our knowledge) that focuses on the language individuals use in responding to stories of social suffering, the present study aimed to develop a theoretically grounded and empirically derived taxonomy of these responses. In order to develop and validate such a taxonomy, we collected a total of 172 audio-recorded responses to two true stories of race-based social suffering from two samples of undergraduate students at a large university in the greater Los Angeles area. The resulting coding scheme is presented here along with evidence of its reliability and validity.