Death, Anxiety, and Depression

Abstract

An Arabic version of the Templer et al.'s (1990) Death Depression Scale was constructed and correlated 0.86 with the English version. Its alpha was 0.87 denoting high cross-language equivalence and high internal consistency. It has meaningful factorial structure. However, factor similarity was not high. Subjects were 208 male and female Egyptian undergraduates. Death anxiety and death depression correlated 0.69. Both scales had somewhat similar positive and significant correlations with general anxiety (STAI-T) and gender. Death anxiety correlated 0.32 ( p > .001) with general depression (BDI), while the correlation between death depression and general depression was not significant. Two Varimax factors were extracted: death distress (highly saturated with death anxiety and death depression scales), and general neurotic disorder (high loadings with general anxiety and general depression). There is a need to factor analyze the individual items of death anxiety and death depression scales among Arabic subjects.