FACTOR STRUCTURE OF PRE-LOSS GRIEF-12 IN CAREGIVERS OF PEOPLE LIVING WITH DEMENTIA

Abstract

Abstract While several studies on post-loss grief have been conducted, little research has examined assessment and treatment for pre-loss grief in family caregivers of persons living with dementia (PLWD). A total of 699 caregivers of PLWD were recruited through relevant dementia associations. The recruitment e-mail provided information about the study and instructions on how to participate by a link to the online survey. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to test the fit of the data from the caregivers and to assess the factor structure of the Prolonged Grief-12 (PG-12) to evaluate pre-loss grief accurately by identifying relevant items and eliminating items that are not appropriate for caregivers of PLWD to assess pre-loss grief accurately. CFA was conducted via the Full Information Maximum Likelihood estimation method to test the unidimensional model of the PG-12 in the study population. The initial model was modified to develop a better-fitting model and to detect misfitting parameters in the PG-12 by deleting irrelevant items for caregivers of PLWD. The adjusted dementia-specific 10-item version (PG-10-D) had significantly improved fit indices with RMSEA = .064, CFI = .972, and GFI = .963. An overall assessment of fit indicated that the model adequately approximated the data. Factor loadings ranged from 0.53 to 0.85. This study suggests that the dementia-specific, unidimensional PG-10-D, modifying the original PG-12, may be useful and parsimonious in assessing and quantifying pre-loss grief in caregivers. Further research is required to establish psychometric properties, including factorial validity and reliability, factorial invariance analysis and further factor analysis.