Assessing Grief and Prolonged Grief Disorder: Can One Size Fit All?
Access to this document is restricted. Some items have been embargoed at the request of the author, but will be made publicly available after the "No Access Until" date.
During the embargo period, you may request access to the item by clicking the link to the restricted file(s) and completing the request form. If we have contact information for a Cornell author, we will contact the author and request permission to provide access. If we do not have contact information for a Cornell author, or the author denies or does not respond to our inquiry, we will not be able to provide access. For more information, review our policies for restricted content.
The purpose of this article is to provide conceptual, technical, and practical explanations for why a single instrument can serve as a multi-purpose measure of grief. Our thesis is based on a conceptualization of Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) as persistent, intense grief. We show how grief severity (i.e., a dimensional component) and persistence of intense grief based on the amount of time that has elapsed since the death (i.e., a temporal component) permit a reliable and accurate method for distinguishing pathological grief (i.e., PGD) from nonpathological grief. In principle, any instrument that assesses these basic dimensional and temporal aspects of grief adequately will suffice to assess grief and PGD. Psychiatric measurement tools can be adapted to fit essentially all applications aimed at assessing grief, both pathological and not.