A Finding Balance Writing Intervention for Older Bereaved Caregivers

Finding Balance: The Experience of Hope for Bereaved Caregivers of Palliative Cancer Patients

Status

Completed

Phases

Study type

Interventional

Source

ClinicalTrials.gov

Registry ID

NCT01416779

Enrollment

Registered

2011-08-15

Start date

2011-02-28

Completion date

2012-06-30

Last updated

2012-07-17

For informational purposes only — not medical advice. Sourced from public registries and may not reflect the latest updates. Terms

Conditions

Grief

Keywords

Writing Intervention, Bereaved Caregivers, Older Adults, hope, inventory of daily widowed life

Brief summary

The overall purpose of this study is to develop and pilot-test a theory-based psychosocial supportive finding balance intervention for older, bereaved spousal caregivers of a palliative cancer patient.

Detailed description

Research devoted to determining the efficacy of bereavement interventions remains a top priority. The development of theory-based, acceptable and feasible psychosocial interventions would begin to address the needs of family caregivers. A prominent theory of coping with bereavement, Stroebe and Schut's Dual Process Model, describes oscillation between loss-oriented and restoration-oriented coping; having a balance between these processes predicted more positive outcomes for older bereaved spouses. Similarly, the process of finding balance emerged as a first step in the search for new hope in the PI's grounded theory research with older bereaved family caregivers. They described the importance and difficulty of finding balance as they recovered from caregiving and struggled to find a new meaning and purpose for their lives after the loss of a spouse to cancer. An intervention focused on finding balance provides an innovative and promising approach to guiding the development of a theory-based psychosocial intervention for family caregivers who become bereaved. In clinical work a highly focused writing intervention has shown important benefits (personal communication, Dr. Robert Neimeyer, March 4, 2009). A validated tool to measure the effectiveness of an intervention to find balance does not exist, however valid existing measures of hope, grief, and an inventory of balance based on the Dual Process Model will be used as proxies. Therefore, the overall purpose of this study is to develop and pilot-test a theory-based psychosocial supportive finding balance intervention for older, bereaved spousal caregivers of a palliative cancer patient.

Interventions

BEHAVIORALWriting Intervention

Finding Balance Writing Intervention

Study design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Intervention model

SINGLE_GROUP

Primary purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

SINGLE (Subject)

Eligibility

Sex/Gender

ALL

Age

60 Years to No maximum

Healthy volunteers

Yes

Inclusion criteria

* women and men, ages 60 and over, who previously resided with and provided care for a spouse with terminal cancer who died within the last year, English speaking, and freely consenting to be involved in the study.

Exclusion criteria

* will be those cognitively impaired, non-autonomous, or not able to give a free and informed consent, as determined by the registered nurse research assistant on initial contact.

Design outcomes

Primary

Measure	Time frame	Description
Grief	2 weeks	Herth Hope Index, Hogan Grief Scale, Inventory of Daily Widowed Life, Finding Balance Scale

Countries

Canada

Outcome results

None listed

Source: ClinicalTrials.gov · Data processed: Feb 4, 2026