The death depression scale-revised. Preliminary empirical validation of the Spanish form

The purpose of this study was to translate Templer et al.'s Death Depression Scale-Revised into Spanish and to evaluate its psychometric properties in a sample of Spanish students. The Death Depression Scale-Revised is a 21-item Likert format questionnaire that could also be applied in true-false format. The Spanish form of the scale was answered by 342 psychology and nursing undergraduates, obtaining a Cronbach's coefficient alpha of .90, and test-retest correlation over four weeks was .87. The first solution of a principal components analysis yielded four significant factors with Eigenvalues greater than one that accounted for 59.3% of the variance. These factors were called, respectively: anergia and vacuum, death sadness, others' death, and anhedonia. The results show that the Spanish adaptation of the Death Depression Scale-Revised has an adequate internal consistency, criterion-validity, and a coherent factorial structure.