Prolonged grief among bereaved people in daily life
Theme: Mental health in a digital age
Type of research (qualitative empirical, quantitative empirical, mixed-method): quantitative empirical, interview
Description:
The death of a loved one is a universally-experienced stressful event and a timely topic in COVID-19 times. While most people adapt following bereavement, one out of ten people experience long-lasting grief reactions, e.g., preoccupation with loss, that interfere with daily life for a prolonged period of time (Lundorff et al., 2017). These reactions are included as prolonged grief disorder (PGD) in the most frequently used diagnostic classification systems in mental health care: the DSM-5 and ICD-11 (Boelen & Lenferink, 2020).
Left untreated, PGD can lead to ongoing psychological distress, but also physical complaints, such as increased mortality rate and risk of cardiovascular diseases. In addition to negative consequences for the individual, untreated PGD confers an economic burden for societies. For instance, Dutch employees report 143 days of absenteeism at work on average after bereavement. Consequently, PGD is a major public health concern.
During this assignment, the students will conduct interviews with the bereaved people as part of a larger project that aims to study and treat PGD in daily life and to investigate bereaved peoples’ psychopathology levels, such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The larger project also uses the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), which could be defined as a self-report measurement method where participants report about their daily life experiences (e.g., grief symptoms, mood) usually more than once a day via different instruments, such as mobile apps (Myin-Germeys and Kuppens, 2022). Examples of research questions that can be answered in this project are: 1) What kind of sample characteristics, such as age and gender, predict the risk of developing a prolonged grief disorder? See the work from Lenferink et al. (2022) to get an impression of the study design and what has done until this stage.
References
Boelen, P. A., & Lenferink, L. I. M. (2020). Comparison of six proposed diagnostic criteria sets for disturbed grief. Psychiatry Research, 285, 112786–112786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2020.112786
Lenferink, L. I. M., van Eersel, J. H. W., & Franzen, M. (2022). Is it acceptable and feasible to measure prolonged grief disorder symptoms in daily life using experience sampling methodology?. Comprehensive psychiatry, 119, 152351.
Lundorff M, Holmgren H, Zachariae R, Farver-Vestergaard I, O'Connor M. (2017). Prevalence of prolonged grief disorder in adult bereavement: A systematic review and meta-analysis. J Affect Disord, 212, 138-149. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2017.01.030.
Myin-Germeys, I.,& Kuppens, P. (2022). The open handbook of experience sampling methodology: A step-by-step guide to designing, conducting, and analyzing ESM studies. Center for Research on Experience Sampling and Ambulatory Methods Leuven.
Who are we looking for?
The interview data will be collected among Dutch bereaved people, so fluency in Dutch language is necessary. The interview data will be collected among bereaved people (with help from primary supervisor who has a participant pool).
What do we offer?
A workshop on how to conduct clinical telephone interviews with bereaved people.