Italian translation and validation of the Perinatal Grief Scale

Abstract

Aims The short version of the Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) has 33 items of Likert type whose answers vary from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree), and is used to assess the grief after perinatal loss and to identify women at major need of specific support. This is the first attempt to validate an Italian version of PGS. Materials and methods The English version of PGS by Potvin et al. was translated into Italian by a professional mother tongue English translator. The survey was administered at 3 different times (translated Italian version; original English version after 10 days; and same Italian version after other 10 days) to 16 Italian/English bilingual women who had experienced a perinatal loss. The reproducibility among the three administrations and concordance were assessed using Cronbach's alpha and Cohen's kappa, respectively. Results Considering the PGS, median score ranged from 74.5 (58.5–94.5) to 78 (64–95), with no significant difference among the three questionnaire administrations (p = 0.616). No significant difference emerged among the three administered questionnaires for subscales (p = 0.095, 0.410 and 0.410 for ‘active grief’ AG, ‘difficulty in coping’ DC and ‘despair’ D scores, respectively). Concordance varied from good to very good among all questionnaire administrations. Conclusions This Italian version of the PGS can be used by clinicians to assess Italian women's responses to stillbirth and perinatal loss, as well as by researchers for research purposes.

A Review of the Psychometrics of Perinatal Grief Instruments

“…In experimental studies, the PGS has been used to assess the effectiveness of clinical interventions (Fernlund et al, 2021; Johnson & Langford, 2015). The PGS has been translated to Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Italian, and Greek (Al-Maharma et al, 2016; Capitulo et al, 2010; Könes et al, 2017; Lai et al, 2013; Maniatelli et al, 2018; Ravaldi et al, 2020; Siadatnezhad et al, 2018; Yan et al, 2010), has demonstrated good reliability and validity in all translations, and has been widely used internationally.…”

Multicountry study protocol of COCOON: COntinuing Care in COVID-19 Outbreak global survey of New, expectant, and bereaved parent experiences

“…ii Higher scores reflect more intense grief. The PGS-SF has been widely used and validated for pregnancy loss and translated into multiple languages including Dutch, 69 French, 70 German, 71 Italian 72 and Portuguese. 70 …”

Assessment of the psychometric properties of the Italian version of the Revised Impact of Miscarriage Scale (RIMS): a validity and reliability study

“…This work was carried out by a team of researchers from the University of Florence and University of Milano-Bicocca. The research group has previous experience in validation of scales applied in the obstetric eld 14,[17][18][19] . After receiving consent from the developers of RIMS, the scale was translated from English to Italian following the methodology reported in "Translation and Cultural Adaptation of Patient Reported Outcomes Measures -Principles of Good Practice" 20 .…”

“…Other commonly used scales are the Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS), which was designed to measure grief after every type of perinatal death 12 , and the National Stressful Events Survey PTSD Short Scale (NSESSS) 13 that assesses the severity of posttraumatic stress symptoms after an extremely stressful event. Both tools are available in Italian (the PGS is also validated) and are widely used for the study of the phenomenon of perinatal bereavement 14,15 .…”