The Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG) is a commonly used self-report measure in psycho-oncology, best supportive care, and palliative medicine. However, existing validation studies yielded conflicting results regarding the structural validity. This study provides a psychometric review and conceptual replication of the ICG latent structure to test the hypothesis that existing studies overfit unreliable sources of variance, which overshadow the unidimensionality of the ICG. All proposed latent models identified in the psychometric review were tested in a series of confirmatory and exploratory structural equation models. Specifically, at least five to six latent intercorrelated factors were necessary to reach acceptable model fit. However, a general CG factor accounted for most variance and ICG sum scores showed predictable associations with anxiety and depressive symptoms, which suggests that the ICG is essentially unidimensional. There are indications that other measures of pathological grief show similar inconsistencies. Overall, potentially emerging subfacets of the ICG should not be interpreted as distinct “symptom clusters.” If time constraints are an issue as is often the case in clinical research, complicated grief may just be measured by a reduced item set without a significant loss of information or complexity.

复杂悲伤清单 (ICG) 是心理肿瘤学、最佳支持治疗和姑息医学中常用的自我报告测量方法。然而，现有的验证研究在结构有效性方面产生了相互矛盾的结果。本研究提供了 ICG 潜在结构的心理测量学回顾和概念复制，以检验现有研究过度拟合不可靠的方差来源的假设，这掩盖了 ICG 的单维性。在心理测量学审查中确定的所有提出的潜在模型都在一系列验证性和探索性结构方程模型中进行了测试。具体来说，至少需要五到六个潜在的相互关联因素才能达到可接受的模型拟合。然而，一般 CG 因素解释了大多数方差，ICG 总分显示出与焦虑和抑郁症状的可预测关联，这表明 ICG 本质上是一维的。有迹象表明，其他病态悲伤的测量也显示出类似的不一致。总体而言，ICG 潜在出现的子方面不应被解释为不同的“症状群”。如果时间限制是一个问题，临床研究中经常出现这种情况，那么复杂的悲伤可能只是通过减少的项目集来衡量，而不会显着丢失信息或复杂性。ICG 潜在出现的子方面不应被解释为不同的“症状群”。如果时间限制是一个问题，临床研究中经常出现这种情况，那么复杂的悲伤可能只是通过减少的项目集来衡量，而不会显着丢失信息或复杂性。ICG 潜在出现的子方面不应被解释为不同的“症状群”。如果时间限制是一个问题，临床研究中经常出现这种情况，那么复杂的悲伤可能只是通过减少的项目集来衡量，而不会显着丢失信息或复杂性。