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Although increasing numbers of grief theorists, researchers, and therapists have begun to focus on the quest for meaning in lives disrupted by loss, no convenient and psychometrically validated measure of meanings made specifically in bereavement has been available to guide their efforts. To construct such a measure, the authors began with a systematic content analysis of sense-making, benefit finding, and identity reconstruction themes gleaned from the narrative responses of a sample of 162 adults who were diverse in their age, ethnicity, relationship to the decedent, cause of death, and severity of their grief response. These were then formulated into a set of 65 candidate items in a Likert scale format representing the level of the respondent's endorsement of the item in the past week. Subsequent administration to a second sample of 300 bereaved respondents permitted factor analysis of this pilot version of the Grief and Meaning Reconstruction Inventory (GMRI), and reduced the items to 29, which loaded on 5 distinct factors, labeled Continuing Bonds, Personal Growth, Sense of Peace, Emptiness and Meaninglessness, and Valuing Life. Both the overall GMRI and its constituent factors showed good internal consistency and strong convergent validity in the form of negative correlations with established measures of bereavement-related negative emotions, symptoms of complicated grief, and more general psychological distress and mental health symptomatology, and positive correlations with grief related personal growth. The authors close by noting several specific research and clinical applications of the measure, which could play a useful role in testing and refining contemporary models of meaning made in the wake of loss.

Recent research on grieving populations has emphasized the role of meaning making in adaptation to bereavement, typically relying on simple self-reports of the extent to which respondents have been able to find sense or benefit in their loss. The present article reports the development of a reliable and comprehensive coding system for analyzing meanings made in the wake of the death of a loved one, yielding a 30-category codebook demonstrating excellent reliability, and comprising both negative and positive themes that arise as grievers attempt to make sense of loss. Based on an intensive qualitative analysis of a diverse sample of 162 adults mourning the natural or violent death of a variety of loved ones, the Meaning of Loss Codebook could prove useful in process-outcome studies of grief therapy, analysis of naturalistic first-person writing about bereavement experiences in grief diaries and blogs, and clinical assessment of meanings made in the course of bereavement support or professional intervention.

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