Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2011, Vol 2, Issue 2
Abstract
Both grieving the loss of a loved one and using spirituality or religion as an aid in doing so are common behaviors in the wake of death. This longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors follows up on our earlier study that established the relation between positive and negative religious coping on the one hand and complicated grief (CG) on the other. In the current report, we broadened this focus to determine the relation between religious coping and other bereavement outcomes, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, to establish whether religious coping more strongly predicted bereavement distress or vice versa. We also sought to determine if the predictive power of CG in terms of religious coping over time exceeded that of PTSD and depression. Our results suggested a link between negative religious coping (NRC) and all forms of bereavement distress, whereas no such link was found between positive religious coping (PRC) and bereavement outcomes in our final analyses. Significantly, only CG prospectively predicted high levels of spiritual struggle six months later. Clinical implications regarding spiritually sensitive interventions are noted.
Authors and Affiliations
Robert A. Neimeyer and Laurie A. Burke
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25191
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel2020145
- Views 439
- Downloads 14
The NERSH International Collaboration on Values, Spirituality and Religion in Medicine: Development of Questionnaire, Description of Data Pool, and Overview of Pool Publications
Modern healthcare research has only in recent years investigated the impact of health care workers’ religious and other moral values on medical practice, interaction with patients, and ethically complex decision-making...
Living Joyfully after Losing Social Hope: Kierkegaard and Chrétien on Selfhood and Eschatological Expectation
In this essay, I offer an existential-phenomenological consideration of what it might look like to live joyfully after losing social hope. Using the example of the widespread hopelessness that many are feeling in light...
Religion and Ethical Attitudes toward Accepting a Bribe: A Comparative Study
This study presents the results of an empirical study of ethical attitudes toward bribe taking in six religions—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, the Baha’i faith, Hinduism, and Judaism. The paper begins with a discussion...
Representation and Interpretation as the Basis of Participation in the Trinity
I suggest that God’s life is the Spirit’s eternal interpretation of the Word as the perfect sign (representation) of the Father. Creaturely interpretations imperfectly mirror the perfect coherence of being and represen...
The Cross-Cultural Kingship in Early Medieval Kamar ¯ upa: Blood, Desire and Magic
Kingship in early medieval Kamar ¯ upa (Assam) was influenced by the collision of orthodox ¯ and heterodox Brahmanic traditions with various tribal cultures. Since the last part of the S´alastambha ¯ period (seventh–te...