OMEGA, Vol. 61(4) 269-271, 2010 THE DUAL PROCESS MODEL OF COPING WITH BEREAVEMENT: A DECADE LATER VIRGINIA E. RICHARDSON, PH.D., Guest Editor The Ohio State University, Columbus PREFACE Almost exactly 1 decade ago, Dr. Shirley O’Bryant, professor emeritus in human ecology, asked me to oversee her data and students focusing on older bereaved men. Dr. O’Bryant had received funding from the AARP Andrus Foundation to interview 200 older widowers residing in the Central Ohio area who were in their second year of bereavement. Based on these data, Dr. Shantha Balaswamy and I published the first evaluation of Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut’s newly proposed Dual Process Model of Bereavement (DPM) in the article, “Coping with Bereavement among Elderly Widowers,” published in Omega: Journal of Death and Dying in 2001. We had discovered Stroebe and Schut’s paper, “The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement, Rationale and Description,” published in Death Studies in 1999, and we were intrigued with their challenge to “the grief work hypothesis,” which was the most widely accepted viewpoint on loss and bereavement in popular and scientific journals. The grief work hypothesis claimed that bereaved persons must focus on their feelings of loss or they will experience psychosomatic and other maladaptive symptoms and will never recover from their loss. Bereaved persons must confront their painful feelings and “work through them” in order to avoid developing disordered grief reactions, according to proponents of this perspective. Stroebe and Schut (1999) identified several problems with the grief work hypothesis, including lack of solid supporting evidence, inadequate clarity of the concept and processes, and inaccurate operationalization of concepts. By 269 Ó 2010, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: 10.2190/OM.61.4.a http://baywood.com