A Self-Administering Assessment of Personal Meanings of Death: Report on the Revised Twenty Statements Test

Abstract

This article reports on a scale revision of the Twenty Statements Test (R-TST)¹; a measure designed to uncover multidimensional, personal reactions to death. Data were collected from six samples to develop the final scale revision and investigate some of its psychometric properties. The revised instrument is a self-administering, open-ended questionnaire eliciting twenty responses to the probe question; “What does your death mean to you?” Seven mutually exclusive, content categories and three summary-affective categories were developed through content-analysis procedures to assess favorable and unfavorable religious, personal, and social reactions to death. Interjudge agreement and two-week test-retest reliabilities were satisfactory for all scoring categories. Data indicate that the R-TST is a useful instrument to measure the multidimensionality of death attitudes and yields information on several death-related dimensions that are not assessed by other self-report measures.