Translation of the short version of the Perinatal Grief Scale into Swedish

Women's emotions and grief after miscarriage are influenced not only by the context in which the miscarriage occurred but also by their past experience, the circumstances around the miscarriage and their future prospects. Their emotions therefore express a specific form of grief. Normally the time needed to work through the loss varies. A number of different scales, measuring women's emotions and grief after miscarriage have been published. One instrument that measures the specific grief, such as the grief after miscarriage is the Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) that was designed to measure grief after perinatal loss and has good reliability and validity.

The purpose of this study was to translate the PGS into Swedish and to use the translation in a small pilot study.

The original short version of the PGS was first translated from English into Swedish and then back-translated into English, using different translators. During translation and back-translation, not only the linguistic and grammatical aspects were considered but also cultural differences. The Likert 5-point and a 10-point scale were tested in a pilot study where 12 volunteers anonymously answered the PGS twice. The intra-personal correlations were compared and analysed with weighted kappa-coefficient.

In all, five different versions were tested before the final Swedish version was established. The weighted kappa-coefficient for the volunteers was 0.58, which is regarded as representing good reproducibility.

The PGS was translated successfully into Swedish and could be used in a Swedish population. As this work is rather time-consuming we therefore wish to publish the Swedish version so that it may be used by other researchers.