What's in a Story? A Text Analysis of Burn Survivors' Web-Posted Narratives

Story-telling has been found to be beneficial following trauma, suggesting a potential intervention for burn survivors who frequently make use of "telling their story" as part of their recovery. This study is the first to examine the word content of burn survivors' Web-posted narratives to explore their perceptions of the event, supportive resources, their post-burn well-being, and re-integration using a comparison group and a text data analysis software developed by the widely recognized James Pennebaker. Suggestions for using expressive writing or story-telling as a guided psychosocial intervention with burn survivors are made.