Levels of death fear: a factor analysis

Abstract

This article reports principal components and factor analyses of the scores of 60 high school and college students on the seven measures developed by Feifel and his colleagues to assess fear of death at the conscious, imagery, and nonconscious levels. The results did not support the presence of the three predicted levels. The best solution seemed to be the four-component or four-factor solution. The first factor seemed to be a measure of conscious death fear. The other three factors were determined by combinations of the nonconscious measures, suggesting that these measures are assessing different aspects of the subjects' behavior relative to death.