Prolonged grief disorder symptoms in daily life following traumatic loss
Theme: Mental health in a digital age
Type of research (qualitative empirical, quantitative empirical, mixed-method): Quantitative empirical.
Description:
Every person is likely to experience the loss of a loved one. Most people adjust to the loss, yet a significant minority develops prolonged grief disorder (PGD) (10%; Lundorff et al., 2017). PGD covers criteria such as persistent yearning and preoccupation with thoughts about the deceased (American Psychiatric Association, 2022).
In this thesis project, a focus will be put on people who experienced a traumatic loss (e.g., accident, homicide). Traumatic bereavement is a well-studied risk factor for developing PGD (Buur et al., 2024). However, PGD has mostly been studied using retrospective measures (e.g., rating symptoms experienced over the past two weeks), which could lead to an overrepresentation of PGD severity (Lenferink et al., 2022). For this reason, it is beneficial to examine to what extent PGD symptoms fluctuate in daily life.
Research studying other disorders, such as depression, has shown that Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) is a reliable method to assess symptomatology fluctuations and how contextual factors relate to these fluctuations (Pemberton & Fuller Tyszkiewicz, 2016; Shiffman et al., 2008). Generally, ESM participants are asked to monitor their reactions throughout the day for an extended period of time. Not only does this method reduce the probability of retrospective bias (Myin‐Germeys et al., 2018), but it also captures how cognitive, behavioral, and affective reactions interact over short time periods.
This thesis assignment is part of a bigger project that assesses PGD using ESM via the Ethica app. The participants will be interviewed twice (via telephone or survey), before and after answering the ESM questions, to examine psychopathology levels.
Examples of research questions that can be answered in this project are: 1) To what extent do PGD symptoms vary in daily life due to a person’s context? 2) To what extent are PGD symptoms interrelated with each other? 3) To what extent do PGD symptoms vary due to factors such as kinship and time since loss? 4) To what extent is self-monitoring related to psychopathology? 5) To what extent is psychological support related to psychopathology? 6) To what extent is impairment in daily life related to psychopathology?
Who are we looking for?
Proficiency in the Dutch language is preferred but not mandatory. Different research questions will be answered by the students depending on the supervisor.
What do we offer?
Training regarding interview data collection, data collection tools, and a pool of potential participants that the students can contact.