Roadside Mourning: Exposing the Grief Behind Roadside Memorial Construction

Abstract

Objective data collection on roadside memorial-making reveals values, attitudes, trends and behaviour patterns, but hidden behind the raw data is the experience of grief that can not always be best reached by objective analysis. This paper examines ideas about erecting roadside memorials held by those who built them and at the same time validates a professionally informed but still a more intuitive response to the process of data collection. In taking this approach. the paper aims to tap into the stories embedded behind the data. which may otherwise he lost in the usual process of a statistically based data analysis. Is there more that can be learned when the data collector is permitted to analyse and reflect upon what emerges during the process of data collection. rather than on the results of that collection alone?