College student bereavement, scholarship, and the university: a call for university engagement.

The prevalence of bereavement among traditional-aged college students should impel universities to assist bereaved students on their campuses. Dealing with bereavement can not only challenge a college student's completing the developmental tasks that our society sets for the later adolescent years, but also imperil the student's remaining in school and graduating. It is in the best interests of the university to develop and implement a variety of effective interventions to assist bereaved students. The author argues that universities are communities devoted to scholarly endeavors and should explicitly incorporate the dimension of compassion and caring. An abbreviated case study is used to illustrate the situations in which one grieving student found herself when she returned to school following the death of her father. A call is made for greater university engagement by forming a university-based bereavement center to coordinate and conduct coherent inquiry that fulfills the scholarly functions of discovery, application, and instruction. Four specific actions for a bereavement center are to train nonbereaved students to provide peer support, to provide structured interventions for college students at risk of bereavement complications, to raise consciousness about bereavement on the university campus, and to conduct research into various bereavement populations and bereavement topics.

Bereavement and spiritual change.

The thesis of this article is that bereavement is a life crisis that challenges one's assumptions about human existence and provides the grounds for spiritual change. Construing a new understanding of the meaning of human existence and revising assumptions about one's place in the universe is a singular form that indicates spiritual change at work. Three aspects must be present for a life crisis to produce spiritual change: The situation must create a psychological imbalance or disequilibrium that resists readily being stabilized; there must be time for reflection; and the person's life must forever afterwards be colored by the crisis. The premise of this article links spiritual change to what J.W. Fowler (1981) termed transformed faith consciousness and argues that the dual process model of coping with loss (M.S. Stroebe & H. Schut, 1995; M.S. Stroebe, H. Schut, & W.A. Stroebe, 1995; M.S. Stroebe, H. Schut, & J. Van Den Bout, 1994) provides a means to understand how dealing with grief can evoke spiritual change. Some brief case examples are used to examine the thesis that bereavement triggers spiritual change.

TAT results in a longitudinal study of bereaved college students.

The authors analyzed projective data obtained from 141 college students who wrote stories on three separate occasions to selected cards from the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The students included 46 members of support groups for bereaved college students, 34 members of a bereavement control group, and 61 nonbereaved students. The study used a repeated-measures pretest-posttest control group design to gather longitudinal data about the trajectory of bereavement with and without support group intervention. Coders, who reached consistently high interrater reliability, looked for themes of death, grief, coping, and affiliation in the stories. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and repeated-measures MANOVA tests were applied to analyze coding results. Overall MANOVA results indicated significant group differences in the responses to the TAT cards. Repeated-measures MANOVA found group differences in use of themes of death and grief and found Group x Time differences in maintaining a sense of self-efficacy while in a crisis. A majority of the stories contained affiliation imagery but without any group differences in the use of such imagery.

Psychological development during four years of bereavement: a longitudinal case study.

Bereavement in the lives of college students is more prevalent than many persons realize. A survey replicated 4 times on the Kansas State University campus demonstrated that, at any point in time, over 25% of the students were in the 1st year of grief following the death of a family member and nearly 30% in the 1st year of grief following the death of a friend. Grief work can hinder traditional-age college students from resolving normal developmental tasks, such as forming autonomous lives, developing a clear sense of direction, and entering into lasting, intimate relationships. This article provides longitudinal case study information about a traditional-age college student following the death of her father. The data come from multiple sources. Data from the Impact of Events Scale document changes in intrusive and avoidant thoughts and images; journal entries show changes in the student's ongoing relationship with her father, coping with his death and subsequent events colored by her bereavement, and life lessons; data from the Grant Foundation Bereavement Inventory show changes in the student's attachment, reunion fantasies, disbelief about her father's death, identification with her father, and feelings of disloyalty as time passed. Comparisons are made to responses of 80 bereaved students who participated in a separate longitudinal study.

Models for understanding adolescent coping with bereavement.

Several issues impinge on scholars and practitioners interested in adolescent bereavement. First and foremost, adolescent bereavement over the death of a family member or a friend is more prevalent than many persons recognize. Second, scholars and practitioners need models that link adolescent development with adolescent coping during bereavement. Third, models are needed (a) to assist in rethinking what "recovery from bereavement" denotes and (b) to afford criteria for assessing recovery from bereavement. The author reviews findings on bereavement during adolescent development and gives particular attention to three models that enhance our understanding of coping with the life crises bereavement presents to adolescents. One model links grief during adolescence to developmental tasks; another model presents adaptive tasks and coping skills; and the third model identifies sentiments essential for human wholeness. Findings from a variety of studies with bereaved adolescents provide data to test the usefulness of the models. The closing discussion centers on implications for working with bereaved adolescents.

Adolescent reactions to sibling death: perceptions of mothers, fathers, and teenagers.

Fourteen families in which a child had died participated in this study; the mother, father, and one teenager from each family were interviewed. All participants completed a sibling bereavement inventory consisting of 109 scaled items that measured self-concept perceptions and grief reactions. The teenagers completed the inventory in terms of their own reactions; the mothers and fathers were instructed to complete the inventory as they anticipated their teenager would answer it. Mothers held significantly different views of their teenagers' self-concept and grief than did the fathers or the teenagers. Fathers' responses resembled those of their teenagers. In addition to accenting the need to study more fully the family dynamics involved when a child dies, the results call into serious question commonly held views regarding the accuracy and reliability of mothers' perceptions of bereaved children. The results suggest that more credence be given to fathers' observations about the phenomena of bereavement engaging their teenage children.