Grief Impairment Scale: Research and Clinical Implications

Although most mourners are resilient, a significant minority experience a profoundly disruptive course of bereavement that substantially impairs their ability to function in crucial life contexts. This presentation reports the development of a brief and efficient 5-item screening instrument, the Grief Impairment Scale or GIS, which assesses the impact of loss on cognitive, behavioral, health, social role and interpersonal domains. Results document the coherent factor structure, internal reliability, construct and discriminant validity, sensitivity and specificity of the GIS in evaluating clinically significant functional impairment associated with grief and support its use in health and mental health settings for both epidemiological research and treatment planning.

Goals of the Program

1. Identify 3 major limitations of previous scales for assessing functional impairment in the context of bereavement
2. Describe the key biopsychosocial domains assessed by the Grief Impairment Scale (GIS)
3. Summarize the evidence for the GIS’s factorial, convergent, and discriminant validity
   Discuss two practical uses of the GIS in health and mental health care settings

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