Family Members Grieving the Loss of a Person to Incarceration: A Scoping Review Protocol
Creators: name: McLean, Elisabeth
name: Singer, Jonathan
name: Livingston, Tyler
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Clinical Psychology
subject: 170104 Forensic Psychology
subject: FOS: Other medical sciences
subject: Personality, Social and Criminal Psychology

description: Although traditional grief research has focused on the experience of individuals who have experienced the death of a family member or friend, there is a growing body of literature suggesting that individuals may grieve non-death losses, such as job loss or loss of a family member to incarceration (e.g., King &amp; Delgado, 2021; Papa &amp; Maitoza, 2013; Papa et al., 2014). Further, family members of incarcerated persons have found to experience grief responses analogous to those experienced after a death, up to and including symptoms of complicated grief (e.g., yearning and longing for the person; King &amp; Delgado, 2021). However, despite research suggesting that individuals who lose a family member to incarceration experience grief (e.g., Bailey, 2018; Jones &amp; Beck, 2007; King &amp; Delgado, 2021), there is a lack of clarity surrounding this phenomenon. Prior research has utilized terms such as disenfranchised grief (i.e., grief that occurs when a loss cannot be publicly acknowledged or mourned and is not socially supported; Doka, 1989); nonfinite loss (i.e., losses that are continuous and extend over a long period of time; Bruce &amp; Schultz, 2001) and ambiguous loss (i.e., being physically absent yet psychologically present; Boss, 1999) to describe this grief experience. Yet, there are currently no recommendations for standardizing the terminology used to describe this non-bereavement grief experience, which remains a significant gap in the current literature. This lack of conceptual clarity and consistent terminology poses a potential problem for future research in this area and would not enable different researchers to compare their results. Clear, consistent terminology is necessary early on to compare results between researchers and labs as well as to establish a clear framework through which eventual interventions may be built around. Therefore, it is necessary through a scoping review to examine current terms and definitions used in the literature for this experience (i.e., the grief experience of family members of incarcerated persons) and, based off the results, propose a standardized term and definition. This scoping review will focus on family members of incarcerated persons, including adults and children (due to these populations being examined in present literature; e.g., Beck &amp; Jones, 2008; King &amp; Delgado, 2021). <br> A preliminary search for existing scoping and systematic reviews on this topic has been conducted and we did not identify any reviews examining this phenomenon. The initial search was conducted in April 2022 and we searched the following databases: Psycinfo, PsycARTICLES, CINHAL, PubMed, PILOTS, PsychiatryOnline, and EMBASE. <br> The purpose of this scoping review is to examine the extant literature describing grief related to losing a family member to incarceration to provide consistent definitions of the construct(s). In doing so, a clear conceptual framework can be proposed to continue research in this area, which could contribute to future intervention studies to treat this population. More specifically, we aim to examine and describe existing perspectives of grief related to the incarceration of a family member and clarify terminology that is used to characterize this grief experience.