Resilience and vulnerability: prolonged grief in the bereaved spouses of marital partners who died of AIDS

ABSTRACT

Spousal bereavement is closely linked to prolonged grief, that is, significant adjustment symptoms that last for more than six months after the loss. This article focused on potential risk and protective factors that may influence bereavement outcomes. Participants in this study were surviving spouses of individuals who died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). These participants were themselves living with human immunodeficiency syndrome. In this cross-sectional study, 120 bereaved participants completed measures of grief, quality of dying and death of the deceased, negative conceptions of death resulting from AIDS, death attitudes, and personal resilience. The results showed that one-third (35.0%) of the bereaved participants reported grief levels above the prolonged grief cut-off scores, and can be categorized as the “prolonged grief” group. Although quality of dying and death was not associated with the intensity of grief, negative conceptions of death from AIDS, fear of death and resilience independently predicted grief symptoms in the regression models. Our findings provide insight into the grief process for the surviving spouse of AIDS victims in rural China. Since resilience is malleable, developing resilience interventions to enhance adjustment to bereavement may be a promising direction in grief counselling and therapies.

KEYWORDS:

• Prolonged grief
• quality of dying and death
• conceptions of death
• death attitudes
• resilience
• HIV
• AIDS

Acknowledgments

We greatly appreciate Professor Robert Neimeyer for his comments to improve the manuscript, and Melissa Smigelsky for polishing the use of English.

Disclosure statement

The authors have no financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of the research.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by College Research Grant, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. The sponsor had no further role in study design, in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data, in the writing of the report, and in the decision to submit the paper for publication.