Examination of the Psychometric Properties of Marwit-Meuser Caregiver Grief Inventory-Short Form

Alzheimer caregiving literature usually focuses on caregiver outcomes like burden, depression and anxiety from a stress-coping paradigm. Yet, this approach has been criticized as it doesn't capture pre-death grief symptoms emerged in response to the unique pathology of the disease. The aim of this study is to investigate the reliability and validity criteria of the Turkish version of the Marwit-Meuser Caregiver Grief Inventory-Short Form (MMCGI-SF) developed to evaluate predeath grief reactions of adult offspring caring for a parent with AD.

The Turkish version of MMCGI-SF was tested on 190 adults providing care to their parents with AD. Beck Depression Inventory, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory-State Form, Zarit Burden Inventory, Caregiving Well-Being Scale and Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support were also completed by the participants to examine convergent and divergent validity of the scale.

Results of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis showed a good fit between the Turkish version of the MMCGI-SF and the original 3-factor structure of the scale. Total score of the scale was found to have significant positive correlations with depression, anxiety and caregiver burden and significant negative correlations with caregiver well-being and perceived social support scores. The Cronbach Alpha value of the scale was 0.92 and the test re-test reliability was 0.80.

Results of the study have shown that Turkish version of the MMCGI-SF was a reliable and valid tool to assess the pre-death reactions of adult offspring caregivers of AD.