Development and Initial Validation of an Inventory to Assess Grief in Caregivers of Persons With Alzheimer's Disease

Abstract

Results suggest that caregiver grief is neither a unitary nor a static construct and that a scale such as this may be appropriate for use in supportive, clinical, and research settings.

Anticipatory grief in the context of dementia caregiving.

“…On average, the AGS scores are slightly higher than those in the Marwit and Meuser (2002) study, and the MM-CGI scores of the current sample are comparable to those in the Marwit and Meuser (2002) and Adams and Sanders (2004) studies.…”

“…The MM-CGI (Marwit & Meuser, 2002) is a 50-item self report scale designed to measure grief responses of family caregivers of people with Alzheimer's disease. The scale is made up of three factors: personal sacrifice and burden, heartfelt sadness and longing, and worry and felt isolation, which sum to create a total grief score, with higher scores indicating greater levels of anticipatory grief.…”

“…Selected effect sizes from published studies concerning the relationship of grief with depression, well-being, health, and social support suggest medium to large effect sizes (Marwit & Meuser, 2002;Walker & Pomeroy, 1997). According to Adams and Sanders (2004) The relationship between grief and caregiver burden is understudied.…”

“…According to Adams and Sanders (2004) The relationship between grief and caregiver burden is understudied. To date, only one study has examined the direct relationship (Marwit & Meuser, 2002), and that study found that the effect size is large (r = .656). A G-power analysis suggests that a sample size of 15 should be sufficient to detect the effect, with power of .80 for a twotailed test.…”

“…During the progression of dementia family caregivers are confronted with losses of a variety of different aspects of the person they know, such as the loss of meaningful communication, emotional closeness, and aspects of his of her personality. These losses are known to prompt the experience of grief prior to death in some individuals (Meuser & Marwit, 2001;Marwit & Meuser 2002;Adams & Sanders, 2004). This study examined anticipatory grief in a sample of informal dementia caregivers with the following aims: 1)…”