Death anxiety scale means and standard deviations for Ontario undergraduates and funeral directors.

Abstract

Templer's Death Anxiety Scale is a 15-item true-false inventory designed to assess death anxiety in individuals. This procedure, developed and tested in the United States, has here been applied to a Canadian sample of 340 respondents: 42 community college computer science students, 93 university students, 56 community college funeral service students, and 149 licensed funeral service directors in Ontario. In doing so, the stability of previous USA findings and the reliability and generalizability of the instrument have also been investigated. The instrument was distributed to all respondents by mail. A major finding was that funeral directors appear to have lower death anxiety than college students. Implications of this research along educational lines are discussed.