INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF STUDIES USING THE PERINATAL GRIEF SCALE: A DECADE OF RESEARCH ON PREGNANCY LOSS

The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) has been used in many studies of loss in pregnancy, including miscarriage, stillbirth, induced abortion, neonatal death, and relinquishment for adoption. This article describes 22 studies from 4 countries that used the PGS with a total of 2485 participants. Studies th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Death studies 2001-04, Vol.25 (3), p.205-228
Main Authors: Toedter, L J, Lasker, J N, Janssen, H J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abortion
Abortion, Induced - psychology
Abortion, Spontaneous - psychology
Adoption
Adoption - psychology
Comparative analysis
Death & dying
Europe
Fathers - psychology
Female
Fetal Death
Grief
Health technology assessment
Humans
Infant, Newborn
International
Male
Mental Health
Miscarriage
Mothers - psychology
Perinatology
Pregnancy
Psychometrics
Social psychology
United States
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Summary:The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) has been used in many studies of loss in pregnancy, including miscarriage, stillbirth, induced abortion, neonatal death, and relinquishment for adoption. This article describes 22 studies from 4 countries that used the PGS with a total of 2485 participants. Studies that report Cronbach's alpha for their own samples give evidence of very high internal consistency reliability. Evidence for the validity of the PGS is also reviewed, such as convergent validity seen in its association with measures of mental health, social support, and marital satisfaction. The standard errors of the means for the total scale and for the subscales reveal fairly consistent scores, in spite of very different samples and types of loss; computation of means and standard deviations for the studies as a whole permits us to establish normal score ranges. Significantly higher scores were found in studies that recruited participants from support groups and self-selected populations rather than from medical sources, and from U.S. studies compared with those in Europe.
ISSN:0748-1187
1091-7683
DOI:10.1080/07481180125971