MARBLES - Measurements Archive of Reactions to Bereavement from Longitudinal European Studies
 

The death of a loved one is a common negative life event. Most people adjust to loss without problems. A minority of people get stuck in processing. Knowledge about characteristics and predictors of healthy and unhealthy grief is of great importance. This knowledge is needed to improve options for care, ranging from care in the field of public health to highly specialised mental health care. The MARBLES project aims to bring together and make available valuable data on grief, to boost bereavement research and care.

Goals of the MARBLES project

  • Developing an archive of research data on reactions to bereavement, based on FAIR principles (with data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
  • Creating large data-sets of relatively rare cases.
  • Connecting members of the international community involved in bereavement research.
  • Enabling re-use of data by researchers across the globe, including researchers with less research-capacity.

Why is the MARBLES archive useful?

  • To enable efficient re-use of data gathered in projects that have been completed.
  • To foster the application of innovative statistical approaches, requiring large datasets.
  • To facilitate collaborative initiatives for research and grant applications.
  • To bring bereavement research to the realm of open science.

What topics can be studied with the MARBLES archive?

  • Risk and protective factors for healthy and unhealthy grief following traumatic and nontraumatic loss.
  • Cognitive, behavioural, and emotional-regulatory underpinnings of responses to loss.
  • Symptom patterns and profiles of bereaved subgroups.
  • Cross-cultural differences in responses to loss and social, cultural, and religious factors mediating differences.
  • Changes in psychological responses to loss over time.

Project leaders

Collaboration

This project is being carried out in cooperation with ARQ National Psychotrauma Centre.

Current state of the archive (Q2, 2023)

  • The MARBLES project was approved by the Ethics Committee of the faculty of Social Science of Utrecht University.
  • The project is part of the Global Collaboration on traumatic stress.
  • The archives includes data from N≈7000 people including
    • Data from heterogeneous bereaved samples (N≈3400) from six research projects on cognitive behavioral variables in grief (3 data waves)
    • Data from N≈200 people who lost loved ones in the MH17 plane crash (7 data waves)
    • Data from N≈800 elderly bereaved spouses and relatives (4 data waves)
    • Data from N≈200 people who lost loved one in a fatal traffic accident (4 data waves)
    • Interview data from N≈400 Dutch and German people from the TALE study (2 data waves)
    • Data from N≈1100 Dutch bereaved adults from the Utrecht Longitudinal Studies on Adjustment to Loss (ULSATL) (11 data waves)
    • Data from N≈900 adults bereaved by homicidal loss who obtained treatment (2 waves).