ED414532 CG028192
Title:A Scale To Measure the Development
of Children's Concepts of Death.
Author(s): Cuddy-Casey, Maria; Orvaschel,
Helen; Sellers, Alfred H.
Pages: 5
Publication Date: August
1997
Notes: Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychological
Association (105th, Chicago, IL, August 15-19, 1997).
Available from:
EDRS Price MF01/PC01 Plus Postage.
Language: English
Document
Type: Reports--Research (143); Speeches/meeting papers (150)
Geographic
Source: U.S.; Florida
Journal Announcement: RIEMAY1998
The sporadic investigations regarding children's concepts of death have lacked
standard methods or instruments for evaluating these conceptions. Whether or not
research on children's concepts of death can be gauged by a standard set of questions
is explored in this paper. It reports on the evaluation of a new questionnaire's
(Concept of Life and Death Questionnaire (CLDQ)) psychometric properties and uses
this instrument to investigate children's conceptions of death. The preliminary
20 item CLDQ was developed and administered to 50 subjects from ages 7 to 12 years.
Results of item analyses indicate that a revised 12-item CLDQ had adequate internal
consistency for the overall conceptualization of death, as well as the specific
subconcepts of death. Findings suggest that age, cognitive functioning, and exposure
to death were not found to be significantly related to the overall concept of
death, although age was related to two subconcepts of death. Understanding of
death is, therefore, somewhat contingent on chronological age in that children
progressively learn that all things die, and subsequently, how they die. It is
argued that the revised CLDQ offers an efficient means of gauging children's concepts
of death. (RJM)
Descriptors: *Attitude Measures; *Childhood Attitudes;
Children; *Construct Validity; *Death; Elementary Education; *Reliability; Test
Validity
Identifiers: Suicide Ideation
