Developing an understanding of people's experiences using tracing services to search for missing family: a qualitative investigation

Research suggests family separation, particularly prolonged and forced or involuntary separation, can have a negative impact on individuals as well as on relationships between family members. It is suggested ambiguous loss can incur from family separation and a family member being considered missing. People’s experiences of searching for missing family members, and also more generally missing people or disappearances, have been largely neglected in previous research.
A grounded theory approach was used in this study to explore the experiences of individuals who had used a tracing service. Participants were recruited from the British Red Cross’ International Tracing and Message Service. Semi-structured interviews were used with 10 ex-service-users. A grounded theory of ‘A path towards finding missing family and beyond’ was developed, consisting of 10 categories: ‘Background’, ‘Living in Britain prior to finding family’, ‘Finding out about the tracing service’, ‘Using the tracing service’, ‘Communicating with found family’, ‘Implications and consequences of finding missing family’, ‘Language’, ‘Hope’, ‘Expectations’ and “Waiting”. The findings and limitations of the present study are discussed in relation to implications for future research, the British Red Cross and clinical practice.