Measuring Anticipated Loss of Aging Parents: Development of the Parent Anticipatory Loss Scale

Research indicates non-caregiving adult children with aging parents experience anticipatory loss for parents that consists of feelings of gratitude, sadness, and worry. The purpose of this research was to develop the Parent Anticipatory Loss Scale.

Interview data from non-caregiving adult children and extant literature formed the basis for creating items measuring three components of Parent Anticipatory Loss. Expert content validity was established prior to administering the survey to a convenience sample of non-caregiving (N = 315), mostly Caucasian (n = 182, 57.6%) men (n = 202, 63.9%). The crowdsourcing platform, Mechanical Turk, provided an innovative method for sample recruitment.

Questi ons were eliminated as indicated during analysis, yielding a 19-item scale (α = 0.93) with three subscales (α = 0.897 for Gratitude, α = 0.841 for Sadness, and α = 0.833 for Worry). Exploratory factor analysis (Varimax rotation) showed gratitude accounted for 46% of the variance, with sadness and worry accounting for 9.5% and 5.3%.

The Parent Anticipatory Loss scale demonstrates good initial reliability and validity and can be used to measure anticipatory loss for aging parents. Further testing with cross cultural samples is warranted.