Assessing Attitudes Toward Dying and Death: Psychometric Considerations

Abstract

In the 50 years of research in death attitudes, clear gains have been made in the measurement of death concerns and competencies, leading to the development and validation of several scales whose more extensive use could improve the conceptual yield of research in this area. In this article, we review these promising instruments, focusing on nine general questionnaires for measuring death anxiety, fear, threat, depression, and acceptance, and four specialized measures of death self-efficacy and coping, readiness for death, and desire for hastened death. We also offer an orientation to non-questionnaire based techniques for the assessment of death attitudes (e.g., narrative measures, repertory grids, behavioral observations, death personifications and drawings), and close with a note on international developments that hold promise for improved cultural awareness of the role of death attitudes in human life.