Digital Grief Performativity and the Conversion of Mourning into Social Currency on Social Media Platforms in Urban Nepal: A Sequential Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study Protocol

Social media platforms have fundamentally restructured grief expression in digitally connected societies. Rather than providing neutral venues for mourning, platforms shape bereavement through algorithmic amplification, quantified social validation, and monetization architectures. Despite growing scholarship on digital death, no study has examined how grief is systematically converted into social currency in a South Asian context, nor investigated the psychological consequences of this conversion for bereaved individuals in Nepal, where social media adoption has grown by over 340% since 2018 and where traditional Hindu and Buddhist mourning rituals are increasingly mediated through digital platforms. This study aims to identify and characterize the mechanisms through which digital grief is converted into social currency on social media platforms among bereaved Nepali social media users, and to examine the psychological and sociological consequences of this conversion. A sequential explanatory mixed-methods design will be employed across three phases. Phase one will comprise 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews with bereaved Nepali social media users in Kathmandu, analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. Phase two will apply systematic content analysis to a corpus of approximately 800 grief-related social media posts on Facebook and TikTok, the two dominant platforms in Nepal, using a 24-item provisional coding instrument. Phase three will administer a cross-sectional pilot survey (target N = 100) to bereaved Nepali adults using established instruments including the PG-13-R, PHQ-9, and GAD-7, supplemented by the provisional Digital Grief Performativity Scale (DGPS) developed for this study. We anticipate identifying platform-specific mechanisms through which grief is converted into social currency, documenting the psychological correlates of grief performativity among bereaved Nepali social media users, and generating a theoretically grounded framework for understanding digital bereavement in rapidly digitalizing South Asian societies. Findings will inform clinical bereavement practice, platform design ethics, and digital grief theory.