Grief and Post-traumatic Growth Following Miscarriage: The Role of Meaning Reconstruction and Partner Supportive Communication

Abstract

This study used the meaning reconstruction model of bereavement and the theory of conversationally induced reappraisals to investigate factors that influence the association between grief following a miscarriage and post-traumatic growth. Participants included 298 women who had experienced a miscarriage within the previous year. As predicted, a moderate level of grief corresponded with the most post-traumatic growth among bereaved mothers and meaning reconstruction and partner supportive communication moderated this association. The results clarify how grief is integral to post-traumatic growth in the aftermath of a miscarriage and how intrapersonal and interpersonal coping resources can foster post-traumatic growth in the face of grief.

Acknowledgment

The authors wish to thank Erina MacGeorge, Erin Willer, Amanda Holman, and Judy Stern (Infertility Family Research Registry) for their assistance in data collection.

Notes

1 We only included responses from people living in the US to eliminate systematic error associated with country of residence.

2 We also excluded 31 male participants because research suggests that bereaved mothers and fathers often experience and express their grief in disparate ways (Abbound & Liamputtong, 2003), and we had an insufficient sample of men to explore those differences.

3 Scale items can be obtained from the first author.

4 Two additional steps evaluated the three-way interactions among meaning reconstruction, partner supportive communication, and both the linear (Step 6) and nonlinear (Step 7) components of grief. The results showed that none of the three-way interactions were statistically significant.