Measurement invariance and country difference in death anxiety: evidence from portuguese and arab samples

Death is something inevitable and common to all human beings. However, cultures vary in how they define and manage living with the inevitability of death and what happens when a person dies. Among the possible responses to this inescapable reality, there is death anxiety. Several instruments have proliferated in the literature to assess death anxiety. Among them, stands out the Scale of Death Anxiety (SDA) which contemplates somatic, cognitive, emotional and behavioural reactions from a symptomatic perspective. Thus, the objective of this study is the validation and measurement invariance of the SDA in Portuguese and Arab samples (N = 216 and N = 377, respectively). Confirmatory factor analyses, multi-group confirmatory factor analyses measurement invariance and latent mean differences were performed across cultures and gender groups. Our results provided important preliminary evidence for the validity of the scale in both samples. The structure of the SDA remained unchanged in both cultures and genders. The SDA showed partial scalar invariance across cultural groups, and full scalar invariance across gender groups. As expected, the Arab participants showed higher levels of anxiety than the Portuguese sample. The analyses also showed that females in both cultural groups obtained higher scores than males on dysphoria and fear of death. However, the two genders did not differ significantly on avoidance of death. The results show that the SDA is a reliable and valid measure for the study of death anxiety, showing to be invariant between cultures and between genders.