The Grief Study: Sociodemographic determinants of poor outcomes following death of a family member

McCann, Mark (2017). The Grief Study: Sociodemographic determinants of poor outcomes following death of a family member. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-851477

Everybody will face bereavement at some stage; but for some people, this can be a more difficult process. There are many factors that can influence how people cope with the loss of a loved one, including level of family support, financial resources, stress, and the circumstances surrounding death.By studying use of prescription medications to help with mental health, we can get a better understanding of how factors such as age, gender, family support, employment and religion affect how people cope after bereavement. By looking at circumstances of bereavement this study will also discover if the factors that help people cope - such as family support - are more or less important depending on how they lost their loved ones.The Grief Study is based on data from the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study, this holds information on around 500,000 people. By linking this data with the Northern Ireland Mortality Study and Health and Social care information on prescriptions, the Grief Study aims to learn more about bereavement, mental health, complicated grief, and longer term outcomes for people who have lost a loved one.

Data description (abstract)

The primary data source for this study is the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study (NILS), which in 2001 defined a representative cohort of c.28% of the population. It is formed from the linkage of the universal Health Card registration system, 2001 Census returns, and vital statistics data. NILS contains a unique Health and Care Number that enables linkage to other health service databases. It is maintained by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA). The 2001 Census records provided most of the attributes of the NILS cohort members, also contextual information relating to household composition and interpersonal relationships, and characteristics of the household and area of residence.

The vital events linked to NILS were used to determine whether a cohort member had been bereaved between April 2001 (the time of the Census) and the end of December 2009. The 2001 Census asked questions about relationship to other people living in the household, these questions were used to determine who a cohort member lived with, and the vital events records identified co-resident family members’ deaths. Approximately 96% of death records are routinely linked to the NILS dataset using a mixture of exact and probabilistic matching.

Data relating to medications that have been prescribed by a General Practitioner and dispensed from community pharmacies have been collated centrally in an Enhanced Prescribing Database (EPD) since 2009. Each prescription record contains the individual’s Health and Care Number, a General Practice (GP) identifier, the drug name and British National Formulary (BNF) category. Information was extracted for antidepressant and anxiolytic medications (BNF categories 4.1.2 and 4.3) for the period January 1st to February 28th 2010.
Health and Care Number allowed exact matching between prescribing and NILS records. The linkage process was carried out by the EPD and NILS data custodians. The linked dataset was then anonymised before being supplied to the researchers, and was held in a secure setting (9). At no time were patient identifiable data available.

The data used for the Grief study is not publicly available, but researchers can make a request to link data for themselves by contacting the Northern Ireland Longitudinal Study Research Support Unit

Data creators: