Bereavement dyadic coping questionnaire: Development and validation

Abstract

Most theories and empirical studies of bereavement coping focus on the individual, although researchers have highlighted the importance of family-level coping and proposed the concept of bereavement dyadic coping (BDC). We developed and validated a 25-item Bereavement Dyadic Coping Questionnaire (BDCQ). The procedure includes item generation, expert review, and examination of the psychometric properties in 241 bereaved persons in bereaved families from China. Factor analysis revealed four factors: direct loss-oriented, indirect loss-oriented, restoration-oriented, and collaborative. The questionnaire had satisfactory internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent and divergent validity. The BDCQ is the first of its kind to measure dyadic coping in the context of bereavement, permitting future quantitative explorations of bereavement dyadic coping and its influence on bereaved individuals and families.