The Death Transcendence Scale

Abstract

The Death Transcendence Scale (DTS), initially developed by Hood and Morris (1983), is a psychological instrument designed to operationalize the human desire for immortality, drawing theoretical inspiration from the African proverb that suggests a person is only truly dead if they are forgotten. The scale is grounded in the work of Lifton (1979), who posited that individuals seek to transcend mortality through five distinct modes: mystical, religious, nature, biosocial, and creative.

The original DTS contained 23 items structured into five subscales, with responses collected on a 4-point Likert scale. The mystical items were adapted from the first factor of Hood’s Mysticism Scale (1975), while items for the remaining modes were newly generated. Subsequent research by VandeCreek and Nye (1993) introduced three additional items to enhance the biosocial mode, resulting in an expanded instrument that measures an individual’s level of investment in each specific mode of death transcendence.

Keywords

Death Transcendence, Immortality, Lifton’s Modes, Biosocial, Mysticism, Religious Orientation, Fear of Death, Psychological Scale, Likert scale, Thanatology

Authors

Ralph W. Hood, Jr., Ronald J. Morris, Larry VandeCreek, Christopher Nye

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Death Transcendence Scale (DTS) is to systematically identify and quantify the cognitive and experiential orientations individuals hold regarding their desire to achieve a form of enduring significance or immortality after biological death. It serves as a measure of how individuals implicitly wish to be remembered, providing a psychological assessment tool that focuses on constructive coping mechanisms related to mortality, rather than solely measuring death anxiety.

By segmenting the construct into five theoretically distinct modes—mystical, religious, nature, creative, and biosocial—the scale provides researchers with a nuanced understanding of how diverse belief systems, personal achievements, and relational investments contribute to the overall sense of transcending death, based on the framework established by Lifton (1979).

Construct

The DTS measures Death Transcendence, defined as the psychological strategies employed by individuals to overcome or extend beyond the finality of biological death. This construct is operationalized through five subscales, each representing one of Lifton‘s five modes:

• Mystical Mode: Focuses on experiential unity and oneness with the universe, adapted from Hood’s Mysticism Scale.
• Religious Mode: Measures beliefs in traditional forms of life after death and divine continuity.
• Nature Mode: Assesses the belief that one’s existence continues through integration with the enduring natural world.
• Creative Mode: Measures the desire for remembrance through lasting works, achievements, or significant contributions.
• Biosocial Mode: Measures the extension of self through progeny, family lineage, and strong, enduring personal relationships.

The scale items primarily reflect a cognitive orientation toward death, although the mystical items are distinct in that they rely on self-reported, experience-based phenomena.

Validity

Hood and Morris (1983) established the foundational validity of the scale using a principle components factor analysis with a quartimax rotation, which confirmed that the original 23 items successfully mapped onto Lifton‘s five theoretical modes, thus supporting the construct validity of the DTS.

Convergent and divergent validity were explored through correlations with other established instruments. When administered to undergraduate students alongside Spilka’s Fear of Death Scale (1977), all DTS modes, with the exception of the religious mode, demonstrated significant correlations with the Sensitivity toward Death subscale. Furthermore, the DTS results correlated meaningfully with Spilka’s Death Perspective Scale. Intrinsic religiosity (measured by Allport and Ross, 1967) correlated positively with the religious, mystical, and biosocial modes, and negatively with the creative and nature modes. These patterns of correlation suggest that the DTS measures distinct perspectives on death that relate predictably to other consciously held beliefs, including intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations.

Reliability

Internal consistency of the DTS has been assessed using alpha coefficients, which vary across subscales and samples. In the initial Hood and Morris (1983) study, the average alpha was 0.62, ranging from a low of 0.53 for the nature mode to a high of 0.75 for the religious mode.

Subsequent testing by VandeCreek and Nye (1993) showed improvement in reliability. Their first sample yielded an average alpha of 0.79, peaking at 0.84 for the mystical subscale and dipping to 0.55 for the nature items. In their second sample (hospital-related individuals), the average alpha was 0.74, ranging from 0.79 (religious mode) to 0.51 (nature mode). The nature items consistently exhibit the weakest internal consistency across all studies, leading to recommendations for item rewording, particularly concerning the negatively worded mystical items which some respondents found difficult to interpret.

Factor Analysis

The original factor analysis by Hood and Morris (1983) employed principle components analysis followed by quartimax rotation. This procedure successfully isolated the 23 items into five distinct factors, which corresponded directly to the five transcendence modes conceptualized by Lifton.

VandeCreek and Nye (1993) conducted two further factor analyses, including the three new biosocial items. While the results from their hospital-related sample were more consistent with the original 1983 findings, both subsequent analyses indicated that the items comprising the nature subscale demonstrated the weakest factor loading. Researchers have suggested that larger, more diverse samples are required to achieve definitive and stable factor structures, especially for the nature items.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report psychological scale measuring cognitive and experiential orientations toward death transcendence.

Format: 23 (original) or 26 (expanded) items scored on a 4-point Likert scale (1=strongly disagree to 4=strongly agree).

Language Available: English (Original development).

Population Group: General adults, university students, community persons, and hospital patients/family members.

Age Group: Older adolescents through older adulthood (samples included undergraduates and older adults).

Population Details: Normative samples included three cohorts of undergraduate students (N=587, 342, 105), 39 older adults, 166 community persons, and 273 hospital-related individuals (132 patients and 141 family members).

Test Methodology: The instrument is easily administered, scored, and interpreted, requiring no special training. Instructions emphasize confidentiality and the absence of “right” or “wrong” answers. Scoring involves summing the responses on the Likert scale, with higher scores on subscales indicating a greater level of investment in that specific mode of transcendence.

Keywords

Psychometrics, Reliability, Validity, Cronbach’s Alpha, Robert Jay Lifton, Mystical mode, Biosocial mode, Creative mode, Immortality, Psychological assessment

Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: N/A

Affiliation Email addresses: N/A

Correspondence Address: N/A

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Death Transcendence Scale was initially published in 1983 by Hood and Morris. The expanded version incorporating additional biosocial items was published in 1993 by VandeCreek and Nye. Information regarding specific permissions, copyright holders, or commercial usage fees is not detailed in the available primary source material.

Reference’s

Allport, G. W., & Ross, J. M. (1967). Personal religious orientation and prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 5, 432-443.

Hood, R. W., Jr. (1975). The construction and preliminary validation of a measure of reported mystical experience. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 17, 179-188.

Hood, R. W., Jr., & Morris, R. J. (1983). Toward a theory of death transcendence. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 22(4), 353-365.

James, W. (1961). The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Collier.

Lifton, R. J. (1979). The Broken Connection. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Spilka, B., Stout, L., Minton, B., Sizemore, D, (1977). Death and personal faith: a psychometric investigation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 16, 169-178.

VandeCreek, L., & Nye, C. (1993). Testing the Death Transcendence Scale. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 32, 279-283.

VandeCreek, L., & Nye, C. (1994). Trying to live forever: Correlates to the belief in life after death. The Journal of Pastoral Care, 48(3), 273-280.

Items of the THE DEATH TRANSCENDENCE SCALE

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

Please respond to each of the statements below using the following rating scale.

1. strongly disagree
2. agree
3. disagree
4. strongly agree

• I have had an experience in which I felt everything in the world to be part of the same whole.
• I have had an experience in which I realized the oneness of myself with all things.
• I have never had an experience in which all things seemed to be unified into a single whole. (R)
• I have never had an experience in which I became aware of the unity of all things. (R)
• I have never had an experience in which I felt myself to be absorbed as one with all things. (R)
• My death does not end my personal existence.
• Death is a transition to something even greater than this life.
• I believe in life after death.
• Death is never just an ending, but is part of a process.
• There is a Force or Power that controls and gives meaning to both life and death.
• Only nature is forever.
• Death is as natural as anything else in nature.
• I may die, but the streams and mountains remain.
• No matter what, all of us are part of nature.
• Streams, trees, and people are all one in nature.
• Meaningless work makes for a meaningless life.
• It is important for me to do something in life for which I will be remembered after I die.
• If I never do anything significant, my life will have been wasted.
• If others I love do not remember me after I die, my life will have been wasted.
• To be creative is to live forever.
• After death much of myself lives on through my children.
• Without children, much of what is most precious in life would be wasted.
• Without children, life is incomplete.
• *My life may end, but that which is important will live on through my family.
• *Solid relationships with family and friends is a lasting value.
• *Relationships with family and friends are among the most lasting values.

(R) indicates reverse-scored item.

The last three items are added by VandeCreek and Nye. All items should be placed in random order.

Mysticism Subscale = Items 1-5

Religious Subscale = Items 6-10

Nature Subscale = Items 11-15

Creative Subscale = Items 16-20

Biosocial Subscale = Items 21-26