Understanding Grief in Social Work: Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement
Keywords:
Dual Process Model, Grief, Bereavement, Social Work, AssessmentAbstract
Working with and assessing grief issues is central to social work practice. As social work students
on placement in a road trauma counselling and education service, we examined models and
measures of grief that could be used by practitioners in a community-based organisation with
clients impacted by road trauma. In this article, we reflect critically on the ways in which grief
is constructed in practice and measured for research and accountability purposes. We propose
that the dual process model of coping with bereavement (DPM), unlike the diagnostic model
of complicated grief, acknowledges that people cope in individualised and dynamic ways, and
that their experiences of grief are influenced by their external contexts. We identify the inventory
of daily widowed life as a useful measure of the extent to which a person can flexibly move
between different coping strategies for optimal adaptation to bereavement. We conclude that
the DPM enables social workers in this organisation to understand unique experiences of grief
and individual coping strategies and identify the focus for intervention in the bereavement
counselling context.
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