A Chinese version of a Likert-type death anxiety scale for colorectal cancer patients

Abstract

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate and validate the performance of a Chinese version of a Likert-type death anxiety scale for colorectal cancer patients. Methods: This study assessed the death anxiety of 50 colorectal cancer patients, which were selected by convenience sampling method, by using the Chinese version of a Likert-type Templer death anxiety scale (CL-TDAS) on the first day of admission. Results: Most of the respondents finished the entire scale in 3–5 min, and the recovery rate was 94.0%. Cronbach's α indicated that the internal consistency was 0.821 for the complete 15 items, and the correlation between the CL-TDAS and the C-TDAS (non-Likert-type) was 0.79(P 63.78% of the total variability, and that the four-component structure of the data well fitted the model. The mean score of the CL-TDAS was 36.16 ± 9.99 (first day of admission). Conclusion: The CL-TDAS showed reliable performance and can thus be a promising instrument for evaluating the death anxiety of cancer patients. Death anxiety varied for different periods and different genders.

Keywords

• Colorectal cancer
• Death anxiety
• Likert-type scale