The Development of the Widowhood Resilience Scale

Widowhood researchers have been increasingly interested in the construct of resilience and identifying factors which contribute to adaptive responses to conjugal loss. Available measures of general resilience were validated on nonwidowed samples and broadly lack face validity for use with widowed people. This article reports the development and validation of a resilience scale specific to widowhood, the Widowhood Resilience Scale. Initially, qualitative responses from 744 widowed people were analyzed and cross-referenced with existing literature on resilience to develop 49 items. The 49 items were tested on a sample of 1,188 widowed people, resulting in a 6-factor, 25-item scale.

Sex Differences in Medication and Primary Healthcare Use before and after Spousal Bereavement at Older Ages in Denmark: Nationwide Register Study of over 6000 Bereavements

Background. The study aimed to examine sex differences in healthcare use before and after widowhood to investigate whether reduced healthcare use among widowers compared with widows may partially explain excess mortality and more adverse health outcomes among men than women after spousal loss.Methods. All individuals alive and aged at least 60 years in 1996 and who became widowed in the period from 1996 to 2003 were selected from the 5% sample of the total Danish population and all Danish twins. The healthcare use was assessed as the average daily all-cause and major system-specific medication use and the average annual number of visits to general physicians (GPs).Results. The average daily use of all-cause and major system-specific medications, as well as the number of GP visits increased over the period from 1 year before and up to 5 years after a spouse's death, but there were no sex-specific patterns in the trajectories of medication use and number of GP visits after conjugal loss.Conclusion. We found little support for the hypothesis that reduced healthcare use contributes to the explanation of more adverse health outcomes after conjugal loss in men compared with women in Denmark.

Management of Challenges of Conjugal Loss among Chinese Widowers: An Exploratory Study

This study presents an exploration of significant coping strategies for Chinese widowers' healthy adjustment to conjugal loss. The informants, 17 Chinese widowers, were asked to share strategies they have adopted to achieve healthy adjustment to spousal loss. The results reveal that loss-orientation coping, consisting of: 1) emotion-focused coping; 2) social coping; and 3) meaning-focused coping, was the key strategy in dealing with challenges posed by the past. Restoration-orientation coping, consisting of: 1) problem-focused coping; 2) social coping; 3) future-focused coping and 4) meaning-focused coping; was the key to managing challenges posed by present and future needs. It is hoped that insights from this study will inform social workers' practice with Chinese widowers experiencing poor adjustment to conjugal loss.