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. 2015 Jul;32(7):485-92.
doi: 10.1002/da.22385. Epub 2015 Jun 9.

THE STRUCTURED CLINICAL INTERVIEW FOR COMPLICATED GRIEF: RELIABILITY, VALIDITY, AND EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS

Eric Bui  1   2 , Christine Mauro  3 , Donald J Robinaugh  1 , Natalia A Skritskaya  3 , Yuanjia Wang  3 , Colleen Gribbin  3 , Angela Ghesquiere  3 , Arielle Horenstein  1 , Naihua Duan  3 , Charles Reynolds  4 , Sidney Zisook  5   6 , Naomi M Simon  1   2 , M Katherine Shear  3
Affiliations

THE STRUCTURED CLINICAL INTERVIEW FOR COMPLICATED GRIEF: RELIABILITY, VALIDITY, AND EXPLORATORY FACTOR ANALYSIS

Eric Bui et al. Depress Anxiety. 2015 Jul.

Abstract

Background: Complicated grief (CG) has been recently included in the DSM-5, under the term "persistent complex bereavement disorder," as a condition requiring further study. To our knowledge, no psychometric data on any structured clinical interview for CG (SCI-CG) is available to date. In this manuscript, we introduce the SCI-CG, a 31-item "SCID-like" clinician-administered instrument to assess the presence of CG symptoms.

Methods: Participants were 281 treatment-seeking adults with CG (77.9% [n = 219] women, mean age = 52.4, standard deviation [SD] = 17.8) who were assessed with the SCI-CG and measures of depression, posttraumatic stress, anxiety, functional impairment.

Results: The SCI-CG exhibited satisfactory internal consistency (α = .78), good test-retest reliability (interclass correlation [ICC] 0.68, 95% CI [0.60-0.75]), and excellent interrater reliability (ICC = 0.95, 95% CI [0.89-0.98]). Exploratory factor analyses revealed that a five-factor structure, explaining 50.3% of the total variance, was the best fit for the data.

Conclusions: The clinician-rated SCI-CG demonstrates good internal consistency, reliability, and convergent validity in treatment-seeking individuals with CG and therefore can be a useful tool to assess CG. Although diagnostic criteria for CG have yet to be adequately validated, the SCI-CG may facilitate this process. The SCI-CG can now be used as a validated instrument in research and clinical practice.

Keywords: PTSD/posttraumatic stress disorder; anxiety/anxiety disorders; assessment/diagnosis; depression; grief/bereavement/complicated grief.

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References

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