Parents’ estimation on their children's PGD after the expected or unexpected death of a loved one
Summary
Current research examines how well parents can assess their own children's grieving process after the loss of a loved one, and whether this assessment is influenced by the type of accident, the level of maladaptive parental grief, and the age of the child. In the present study, Posttraumatic Grief Disorder (PGD) was used to describe maladaptive grief symptoms in parents and their children. Data from various questionnaires from the 'TrafVic' Kids study were utilized for the analyses in the present research. It is hypothesized that higher levels of PGD in parents will result in greater discrepancies between the reported scores of their children and the scores reported by the parents themselves. Additionally, it is anticipated that the older the child, the larger this discrepancy will be. Furthermore, it is hypothesized that the unexpected death of a loved one will also contribute to a larger discrepancy. After conducting a Multiple Regression Analysis, it can be concluded that only the PGD in parents have a significant effect on the discrepancy score between the reported scores of children and parents regarding their children. Subsequent research is encouraged to further investigate the influence of children's age on this assessment, as this finding showed a trend in the analyses. This follow-up research could potentially be expanded to include interviews to assess parenting styles.