DEATH OBSESSION IN KUWAITI AND AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS

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.