Hope Versus Hopelessness: The Experience of Grief Related to Sibling Incarceration

Abstract

Incarcerated individuals are a population who have historically been underserved, especially regarding psychological care. Any experience with the justice system not only impacts the individuals who are incarcerated, but also the family system as a whole. While research has examined the effects of parental incarceration on children, little is known about the psychological impact of sibling incarceration. This dissertation used ambiguous grief and disenfranchised loss as a framework to study sibling relationships. The study aimed to clarify the relationship between the experience of hope, religious coping, and the non-incarcerated individual’s grief. Participants were 100 individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 who currently have or had an incarcerated sibling. Measures included the Emerging Adults’ Relationships with Siblings Scale (EARSS), the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG), the Adult Hope Scale (AHS), and the Brief Religious Coping Scale (Brief RCOPE). It was hypothesized that sibling closeness and conflict would be associated with complicated grief, that hope would be inversely related to grief, and that religious coping would play a role in grief outcomes. A Catholic-Christian Meta-Model of the Person understanding of the theological virtue of hope provided a framework for the psychological understanding of the experience of grief and hopelessness and its relation to criminality. Particularly, the combination of the domains of psychology and theology provided a more holistic view of the effects of this virtue on the experience of non-incarcerated siblings as well as important clinical implications in the treatment of this population.