MOMSonLINE2 ; A Pilot Study Testing Recruitment and Retention of Women of Color to an Online Support Group for Bereaved Mothers

Feasibility of recruitment as shown by percent of those approached for enrollment who signed up for the study.

Number of participants that completed:

• The 6 week intervention.
• Pre-post surveys.
• Phone interview

The Personal Health Questionnaire Depression (PHQ-8) is a widely used and validated screen for depression. The PHQ-8 is scored by adding scores from each question (0-3) to a final score (0 to 24). Higher scores indicate worse outcome and a score of 10 or higher indicates a positive screen. A positive screen is probable for clinical depression.

PTSD will be measured using the 20-question Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) checklist for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) -5 (PTSD Checklist for DSM-5, Civilian Version). Scores range from 0-80. A score of 33 or above will be used as our cutoff. A score above this indicated a probable diagnosis of PTSD.

The Generalized Anxiety Disorder screen (GAD-7) is a seven-item self-report instrument for screening, diagnosis and severity assessment of anxiety disorder. The GAD-7 total score for the seven items ranges from 0 to 21: 0-4 Minimal anxiety; 5-9 Mild anxiety; 10-14 Moderate anxiety; 15-21 Severe anxiety.

The Perinatal Grief Scale measures grief, coping, and despair following the death of a child. It includes 33 questions on a 5-point Likert scale that ranges from 1=strongly agree to 5=strongly disagree. A higher score would indicate more grief and a lower score less grief. A score cutoff of >40 to indicates more severe grief. Two questions were inadvertently dropped from the PGS in our surveys; this allows pre-post analysis but limits comparison to other studies. With this omission, our PGS scores could range from 31 -155.