Development and Preliminary Validation of the Complicated and Adaptive Grief Inventory for Native Americans

Grief research among American Indian (AI) and Alaska Native (AN) people has been limited to studies on historical trauma and elevated mortality rates among AI/ANs. A lack of validated measures is one barrier to grief research with AI/ANs. Therefore, we conducted three studies to develop and validate a culturally congruent measure of grief. In Study 1, interviews were conducted with 12 AI reservation-based community members to understand perspectives on grief. In Study 2, AI/AN community members ( n = 10) and professionals ( n = 7) provided feedback on measure items adapted or developed in Study 1. In Study 3, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses using separate randomly selected samples from a web-based survey of 600 AI/ANs were conducted to identify the factor structure of the Complicated and Adaptive Grief Inventory for Native Americans (CAGI-NA). Findings suggest that the resulting 30-item CAGI-NA is valid, reliable, and suitable for use in research with AI/AN people.