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risk (e.g., of complications in their grief/grieving process), to work toward lowering their suffering, and to enhance the provision of help where needed. Many potential risk/protective factors have been examined, including intrapersonal ones (e.g., personal circumstances prior to the death; kinship to the deceased), situational ones relating to the death itself (e.g., expected versus unexpected), or interpersonal ones (e.g., availability of social and emotional support). Despite this broad coverage, and the fact that there is extensive literature on funeral practices, the role of funeral ceremonies does not feature prominently, if at all, as reflected in systematic risk factor reviews (e.g., Burke & Neimeyer, 2013; Kristensen et al., 2012; Lobb et al., 2010; Stroebe et al., 2006). Nevertheless, there is widespread belief that participating in body disposal-related ceremonies actually helps one’s grief (cf. Lensing, 2001; Mitima et al., 2019), from which it could be surmised that minimal or no observance of funeral rites would have a negative impact on adjustment to the loss of a loved one. It is possible that circumstances may prevail to limit funeral participation, in which case, if benefits are indeed to be gained by taking part in such ceremonies, detrimental effects could ensue. There have been significant changes in services provided by the funeral industry to meet with contemporary societal norms and consumer needs, some of which minimalize the nature of ceremonial events surrounding body disposal. To take the case of the United Kingdom (where the empirical study reported later was conducted): developments in funeral practices have been particularly manifest here. Most notably for the current Birrell et al. 371 interest, there has been a growing percentage of cremations in the British Isles to approximately 78% in 2018 (The Cremation Society, 2019), and major changes have occurred in general in the provision of extended range of funeral options over recent years, partly—as a result of market and cultural transitions (a similar trend has been observed in the United States, cf. Beard and Burger 2020). These developments have been accompanied by an increase in the numbers of direct and unattended cremations (Royal London, 2016). The funeral industry has responded to consumer demand by offering more affordable/simplified solutions, with 5% of consumers choosing a direct cremation funeral and direct burials, despite these not being a mainstream offering. These data and the broadening of the range of cremation options suggest that there is demand for nontraditional affordable funerals (cf. Royal London, 2016). Concern has been expressed about the loss of benefit to the bereaved through such reductions in ceremonials surrounding burial or cremation (Birrell & Sutherland, 2016). It is thought that such options as direct cremation, with no attendance at the cremation and even perhaps without a memorial service, may indeed cost less—but actually come at a cost, diminishing opportunities for bereaved persons to take leave of the deceased in meaningful ways, ones that may serve to console and comfort family members and friends. An underlying concern motivating our investigation was to examine whether contemporary changes in cremation practices which have been aimed in part to better-meet the needs of bereaved people could in fact have the paradoxical consequence of worsening the upset associated with bereavement. Empirical investigation can help clarify whether such concerns are justified. Therefore, the primary goal of the current project was to examine if funeral practices are a predictor of grief, by investigating connections between features of cremation and the experience of grief, specifically: Do the choices that bereaved persons make regarding their options for funeral arrangements relate to their course of grief and grieving? Although the risk factor literature revealed little attention to the role of funerals, there is a burgeoning literature in the funeral domain which has provided relevant knowledge of use in designing our empirical study. We briefly review these sources next, covering background information on the range of body-disposal ceremonies; illustrating what is known in general about functions of funerals; and evaluating the extent to which empirical studies have provided scientific information on our research question. We make reference to studies of rituals too, since the topic of symbolic activities is clearly closely related to our research question, though it is not the focus of our own investigation. Review of Scientific Studies of Funeral Practices and Grief Information deriving from a systematic literature search is summarized next.1 As will become evident, the sources cover a wide range of studies and designs, 372 OMEGA—Journal of Death and Dying 81(3) qualitative and quantitative, large or small scale, descriptive or controlled, empirical research or more-theoretical, scholarly explorations. First, there has been inventorization of the range of funeral practices (e.g., expansion of options). Dickinson (2012) reviewed the wide range of methods/ memorializations and shifts to diverse contemporary trends and discussed the impact of change (e.g., cost-related ones). Walter et al. (2012) evaluated how the internet has changed the ways in which we die and mourn, considering how
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