Tag Archives: obituaries

Analyzing what Americans value by examining lots of obituaries

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How are people remembered? One team of researchers analyzed millions of obituaries. Here is the abstract from the recently published study:

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How societies remember the dead can reveal what people value in life. We analyzed 38 million obituaries from the United States to examine how personal values are encoded in individual and collective legacies. Using Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, we found that tradition and benevolence dominated legacy reflections, while values like power and stimulation appeared less frequently. Major cultural events—the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the 2008 financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic—were systematically linked to changes in legacy reflections about personal values, with security declining after 9/11, achievement declining after the financial crisis, and benevolence declining for years after COVID-19 began and, to date, not yet returning to baseline. Gender and age of the deceased were also linked to differences in legacy: Men were remembered more for achievement, power, and conformity, while women were remembered more for benevolence and hedonism. Older people were remembered more for tradition and conformity than younger people. These patterns shifted dynamically across the lifespan, with obituaries for men showing more age-related variation than legacies for women. Our findings reveal how obituaries serve as psychological and cultural time capsules, preserving not just individual legacies, but also indicating what US society values collectively regarding a life well lived.

This sounds like a novel means by which to examine American cultural values. Obituaries are regularly published and are often accessible to many readers. But to collect and analyze millions of obituaries requires particular skills. This is a big data approach.

The study could also raise multiple additional research questions:

  1. How many of these obituaries were written by the deceased or decided upon before death? Does this change the content?
  2. What is the process by which people writing the obituary after death decide on the words to use and values to emphasize?
  3. How much do these values in obituaries match what people say they value in life at different stages before they die?

Sociological study: NYT obituaries have more celebrity deaths over the decades

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Here is a unique place to look for American’s obsession with celebrities: examine the “Notable Deaths” section of the New York Times since 1900.

Sociology researchers at the University of South Carolina analyzed obituaries in the New York Times from the same 20 randomly selected days in 1900, 1925, 1950, 1975 and 2000. From this sample, they ranked how much attention was given to the deaths of people in certain occupations in each year. They found that obituaries of entertainers and athletes marched steadily to the top in rank — from seventh in 1900, to fifth in 1925, to third in 1950 and first in 1975 and 2000; in 2000, celeb athletes and entertainers accounted for 28 percent of obituaries in the newspaper, the researchers said.

Meanwhile, the researchers said the number of obituaries for public figures in manufacturing and business halved over the century. Similarly, religious obituaries fell from fourth place in mid-century to last in rank, and the researchers said they did not find a single notable death article for a religious figure in their sample for the year 2000.

“Most striking are the simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries,” lead researcher Patrick Nolan said in a statement from the University of South Carolina. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival,” added Nolan, who details the research in the journal Sociation Today.

So have celebrities replaced some of religion?

It would also be interesting to see whether the New York Times did this consciously and if so, how exactly this conversation went. Did readers actually suggest they wanted to see more celebrity news in the deaths section?