Death obsession in Kuwaiti and American college students.
Author: Abdel Khalek AM, Lester D.
Source:
Death studies, 27(6), 541-553.
Two samples of Kuwaiti (n = 460) and American (n = 273) male and female
undergraduates responded to the Death Obsession Scale (DOS) in Arabic and
English, respectively. Cronbach's alpha reliability statistics were .96 and .91,
respectively, denoting high internal consistency. In the same vein, all the
item-remainder correlations in both samples were significant denoting item
validity and content validity. A general factor of death obsession was disclosed
in the Kuwaiti sample, whereas two salient factors (death rumination, and death
dominance and repetition) were extracted in the American sample. Gender-related
differences were significant in the Kuwaiti sample, that is, females attained
higher mean score than their male counterparts, whereas there were no significant
gender differences in the American sample. Kuwaiti students attained
significantly higher mean DOS score than their American counterparts in the total
and all the individual items of the DOS.