'Do grief reactions predict agency and communion themes in loss narratives?'
(AsPredicted #82240)
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1) Have any data been collected for this study already?
It's complicated. We have already collected some data but explain in Question 8 why readers may consider this a valid pre-registration nevertheless.

2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study?
This is a longitudinal data set. We are working with Time 1 – 4 (T1-T4). We expect higher levels of agency and communion themes, content coded from narratives of life chapters about loss of a loved one (at T4) will correlate negatively with scalar measures of grief, PTSD symptoms, depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms, as measured at times 1-4. We will Bonferroni correct the significance level by dividing the significance level of .05 with the number of correlations run (32).

Note that we have similar hypotheses for self-reported emotional tone and meaning (four single item measures based on Holm & Thomsen, 2018) for the narratives in relation scalar measures grief, PTSD symptoms, depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms, as measured at times 1-4. These hypotheses and analyses are not preregistered as initial analyses have already begun.

3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured.
Variables:
Agency themes: Content-coded from the written narratives of the chapters about the loss using an established coding system, modified for the current study, ranging from 0-4 (McLean et al., 2019)
Communion themes: Content-coded from the written narratives of the chapters about the loss using an established coding system, modified for the current study, ranging from 0-4 (McLean et al., 2019)
Grief: Prolonged Grief Disorder (PG-13; Prigerson et al., 2009) and Inventory of Complicated Grief Revised (ICG-R; Prigerson & Jacobs, 2001)
Depressive symptoms: Center for Epidemiologic Studies Short Depression Scale (CES‐D 10; Radloff, 1977)
PTSD symptoms: PTSD checklist – Civilian Version (PCL-C; Ruggiero et al., 1999)
Anxiety: Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7; Spitzer et al., 2006)
Neuroticism: NEO Personality Inventory-Revised – neuroticism only (NEO-PI-R; Costa & McRae, 2004)
Attachment: Experiences in Close Relationship Scale – short (ECR; Wei et al., 2007)

4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to?
The study is a longitudinal survey design and participants will not be assigned to conditions

5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis.
The hypothesis will be tested using series of correlations.

6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations.
We will exclude participants who
1) Have not completed the written narrative for the chapter concerning the loss from which the agency and communion variables must be derived.
2) Have more than 50% missing items on scales or missing data for single items needed in each analysis

7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size?
No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined.
The study is a part of a prospective study of bereaved individuals and data for times 1-4 have already been collected (e.g., see sample sizes at: Harris, Brookman, & O'Connor, 2021; Lundorff, Johannsen & O'Connor, 2021). Not all participants complete all measures to be used in the current study, but analyses will include those participants described in response to point 6 above.

8) Anything else you would like to pre-register?
(e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?)
The present study analyze data from The Aarhus Bereavement Study (TABstudy). A multi-wave survey of adaption to bereavement the first year after spousal and parental loss in adulthood of which the last author of this preregistration as Primary Investigator [psy.au.dk/grief].
Although data for times 1-4 has already been collected, this may be considered a valid pre-registration because the narratives for the chapter concerning the loss have not yet been content-coded for agency and communion themes and hence we have not been able to conduct the relevant analyses yet.

Secondary analyses:
We will explore whether agency and communion themes vary with other measured variables, including neuroticism and attachment measured at time 1 (correlations) as well as type of relationship (partner or parent), gender, age, education, and type of death measured at time 1 (t-tests and 1-way ANOVAs). Based on the results of these analyses we will conduct two multiple regressions with agency and communion as outcome variables and variables with significant relationships to agency and communion in the initial simple analyses as predictor variables. If several symptom measures show significant correlations with agency and communion in testing of hypothesis 1 (e.g. grief symptoms at times 1, 2, 3 and 4 all correlate significantly with agency and communion), we will include the symptom measure with the numerically highest correlation to reduce risk of collinearity and keep the number of predictor variables reasonable.