Death Anxiety Scale

Abstract

The Death Anxiety Scale (DAS), developed by Donald I. Templer in 1970, is a widely recognized psychological instrument designed to quantify an individual’s level of death anxiety. It is a brief, 15-item scale utilizing a true/false response format, yielding a single, overall composite score. Of the 15 items, nine are keyed true and six are keyed false.

The DAS is valued for its ease of administration and high face validity. While it was constructed to produce a unidimensional score, the theoretical construct of death anxiety is known to be multifaceted. Consequently, the precise nature of the multiple factors contributing to the final score and their detailed interpretation remain areas of ongoing research and discussion in the psychological literature.

Keywords

Death Anxiety Scale, DAS, Thanatophobia, Templer, Fear of Death, Psychological Assessment, Psychometrics, True/False scale, Mortality.

Authors

Donald I. Templer.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) is to provide a comprehensive, yet parsimonious, measure of an individual’s general attitudes, concerns, and fears related to death and dying. Unlike some similar measures available at the time of its creation, Templer’s instrument was designed to encompass a wide spectrum of psychological and existential experiences associated with mortality.

Although the theoretical focus of death anxiety is recognized as being multifaceted, Templer chose to construct an instrument yielding a single, overall composite score. This methodology was intended to establish gross parameters of the fear of death, thereby providing a robust foundation upon which more refined perspectives could later be developed.

Construct

The DAS measures the psychological construct of death anxiety, defined as an individual’s emotional and cognitive response to the reality of mortality. Theorists suggest that death anxiety provides a vital link between how individuals perceive life crises and their subsequent coping mechanisms, suggesting it is an “integral part of the flow of life itself” (Lonetto & Templer, 1986).

Based on the growing literature on this topic, the construct measured by the DAS incorporates four key factors that emerge as common components of death-related concern:

• Concern about intellectual and personal emotional reactions to death.
• Concern about physical change and bodily deterioration.
• Awareness of and concern about the passage of time and finitude.
• Concern about the pain and stress that can accompany illness and the dying process (Lonetto & Templer, 1986).

Validity

Considerable data has been gathered to support the validity of the DAS. Face validity was established during the initial construction phase by subjecting an original pool of 40 items to the judgment of clinical experts, including a clinical psychologist, two clinical psychology graduate students, and four chaplains in a state hospital. Nine items were eliminated for failing to evidence sufficient face validity.

Internal consistency was crucial for item selection. Item-total score point biserial correlation coefficients were determined for the 31 remaining items. Sixteen items failed to consistently reach statistical significance, resulting in the final 15 items found on the final version of the DAS.

Construct validity was addressed in two separate validation projects (Templer, 1970). In the first, psychiatric patients identified with high death anxiety showed significantly elevated DAS scores (mean: 11.62) compared to a matched control group (mean: 6.77, t = 5.78, p < .01). Furthermore, the DAS demonstrated strong concurrent validity, correlating highly (.74) with Boyar’s Fear of Death Scale (FOOS; Boyar, 1964).

Crucially, the DAS demonstrated discriminant validity against general anxiety measures. Correlations between the DAS and three well-known anxiety scales from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)—the Manifest Anxiety Scale, the Welsh Anxiety Scale, and the Welsh Anxiety Index—were measured at .39, .36, and .18 respectively. Since the correlation with the FOOS was substantially higher than the correlations with these general anxiety measures, the findings support the contention that the DAS specifically measures death anxiety rather than general anxiety.

Reliability

The DAS has demonstrated reasonable psychometric reliability. Test-retest reliability was assessed over a three-week interval using a sample of 31 community college participants, yielding a strong correlation coefficient of .83. This suggests that the scores obtained are stable over time.

In terms of internal consistency, which measures the homogeneity of the items, the DAS achieved a reasonable score of .76 using the Kuder-Richardson reliability coefficient. These statistics confirm that the 15 items are measuring a consistent underlying construct.

Factor Analysis

The Death Anxiety Scale was intentionally developed by Templer (1970) as a unidimensional instrument designed to yield a single, global measure of death anxiety. This initial construction prioritized the establishment of gross psychometric parameters rather than the delineation of specific sub-factors.

However, subsequent research and theoretical frameworks acknowledge that the construct is complex, comprising multiple factors (such as fear of pain, fear of the unknown, and fear of time passage). The original validation studies did not fully elaborate on how these theoretical sub-factors load onto the overall score, and the interpretation of the single composite score must proceed with the understanding that it aggregates several distinct dimensions of death concern.

Instrument

Test Type: Psychological Self-Report Scale

Format: 15-item, True/False format, yielding a single composite score.

Language Available: Arabic, German, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Korean, Afrikaans, and Japanese.

Population Group: General adult population (used in both clinical and non-clinical settings).

Age Group: Primarily used with adults, including community college participants, undergraduates, and psychiatric patients. Evidence suggests DAS scores may decrease with age.

Population Details: Comprehensive representative norms have not been universally established. Published data relative to specific populations show means typically ranging from 4.5 to 7.0, with standard deviations slightly above 3.0. Females consistently score higher than males. A cross-sectional study of 226 predominantly middle-class, Caucasian, well-educated individuals reported an overall mean of 6.16 (6.76 for males, 8.04 for females), with a standard deviation of 3.21.

Test Methodology: Self-administered questionnaire. The DAS requires no special examiner skill to administer or score, contributing to its practical utility.

Keywords

Psychometrics, Norms, Reliability, Validity, MMPI, Construct validity, Discriminant validity, Internal consistency.

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: N/A

Affiliation Email addresses: N/A

Correspondence Address: N/A

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

Test Year: 1970

Permissions/Fee: Not specified in the source material.

Reference’s

Boyar, J. I. (I 964). The construction and partial validation of a scale for the measurement of the fear of death. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

Lester, D., & Templer, D. I. (1993). Death anxiety scales: A dialogue. Omega, 26, 239-253.

Lonetto, R., & Templer, D. I. (I 986). Death anxiety. New York: Hemisphere Publishing Corporation.

McMordie, W. R. (1979). Improving measurement of death anxiety. Psychological Reports, 44, 975-980.

Templer, D. I. (1970). The construction and validation of a death anxiety scale. Journal of General Psychology, 82, 165-177.

Templer, D. I., & Ruff, C. F. (1971). Death anxiety scale means, standard deviations, and embedding. Psychological Reports, 29, 174–175.

White, W., & Handal, P. J. (1991). The relationship between death anxiety and mental health/distress. Omega, 22, 13-24.

Items of the DEATH ANXIETY SCALE

IMPORTANT: The following scale items must be preserved in their original language and must not be changed in any way.

• T I am very much afraid to die.
• F The thought of death seldom enters my mind.
• F It doesn’t make me nervous when people talk about death. T I dread to think about having to have an operation.
• F I am not at all afraid to die.
• F I am not particularly afraid of getting cancer. F The thought of death never bothers me.
• T I am often distressed by the way time flies so very rapidly. T I fear dying a painful death.
• T The subject of life after death troubles me greatly. T I am really scared of having a heart attack.
• T I often think about how short life really is.
• T I shudder when I hear people talking about a World War III. T The sight of a dead body is horrifying to me.
• F I feel that the future holds nothing for me to fear.