Pilot evaluation of the Children and Grief Manual for Palestinian adolescent complicated grief

A study to evaluate the efficacy of the Children and Grief Manual for Palestinian adolescents who experienced complicated grief has been carried out. Professor Ian Barron from University of Massachusetts and Dr Ghassan Abdallah from the Center for Applied Research in Education, West Bank are responsible for the study which was made possible with financial support from the Grieg Foundation.

Originally, the project sought to address traumatic loss and complicated grief in Palestinian children in the West Bank who had experienced a multiplicity of losses related to violent military occupation and COVID-19. The inception of the project, however, immediately followed the Hamas attack on October 7th, 2024. Because of the subsequent genocide in Gaza and the dramatic increase in Israeli settlements, and settler, and military violence, the research required a re-design from a randomized control trial to pre/post-test and follow-up set within a context of extreme violence.

One hundred and nineteen adolescents referred to school counselors in the occupied West Bank for complicated grief received 7 two-hour sessions of the Manual on a weekly basis. A pre/post and follow up design assessed program fidelity, utilized measures of complicated grief, PTSD and depression, and conducted interviews with counselors and adolescents. The study found high levels of protocol fidelity leading to significantly reduced complicated grief, PTSD, and depression in the short and longer term. Counselors reported program delivery as a positive experience which was highly tolerated by adolescents. The Children and Grief Manual was found to be relatively inexpensive to deliver. It is recommended that the Manual be delivered at scale across Palestine and that future research involves randomized control trials.