Traumatic and complicated grief among children: one or two constructs?

The purpose of this study was to examine the concepts of traumatic and complicated grief among children. Some authors seemingly use the concepts interchangeably, whereas others make a distinction between the two. A sample of 240 mainly parentally bereaved children were administered the Extended Grief Inventory (EGI). Two confirmatory factor analyses were run to examine the EGI factor structure and to determine whether traumatic and complicated grief are one or two concepts. Goodness-of-fit tests for the two models was considered acceptable for both models, however, the two-factor model was a better fit. Multiple regression analyses found that children's age, gender, and ethnicity were important predictors of traumatic grief but only gender was a predictor of complicated grief. Violent death was a predictor of complicated grief in an unadjusted regression analysis.