[Inventory of experiences in grief (IEG): adaptation to Spanish, reliability and validity]

Abstract

Objective: To adapt to Castilian the Inventory of Experiences of Grief (IEG) of Catherine Sanders et al. (1977) and study its reliability and validity.

Design: In two stages: cross-cultural adaptation of a questionnaire and cross-sectional study with control group.

Setting: Primary care teams in Vizcaya.

Participants: 147 people bereaved in the period between 3 months and 3 years before the study, and 36 who had lost no direct family member in the previous 5 years.

Measurements and main results: The IEG in American English was translated, back-translated and finally reviewed by Sanders and her colleagues, whose valuation was that the Castilian version was the same as the original. Reliability: the internal consistency of each of the scales of grief on the IEG (Cronbach's alpha) ran from 0.43 to 0.85. Factor validity: the first IEG factor adapted was similar to the original one (despair, somatization, anger, blame, depersonalisation and social isolation). Discriminating validity: all the grief scales on the IEG, except anxiety in face of death, discriminated (p < 0.05) between grieving and not grieving. Validity by hypothesis: the IEG scales showed differences (p < 0.05) between the bereaved according to sex, age, place of death of the spouse and time elapsed since death. Convergent validity: all the IEG grief scales correlated positively (p < 0.05) with the scales in the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief.

Conclusions: The IEG adapted to Castilian is equivalent to the original and has similar reliability and validity.