Development and Psychometric Properties of the Justified Death Attitude Scale

Abstract

Background: Both capital punishment and euthanasia are highly disputed practices that are considered justified by their proponents. Emotional component of attitude has been ignored in the scales developed to assess attitude on capital punishment and euthanasia. Objectives: This development study aimed to develop an assessment tool to evaluate emotional attitude (ignored by previous scales) toward capital punishment and euthanasia that are considered justified by their proponents in 2015. The scale, as defined by the authors, measures individuals' attitude revealing their sense of self or non-self, although lawis in no condition to tackle the exception either crime or euthanasia. After assessing face validity with two psychologists, a clinical psychologist and a psychometric expert at the school of behavioral sciences and mental health, a justified death attitude scale (JDAS) was performed on 571 students of national universities of Tehran to evaluate construct validity of the scale. Data were analyzed using the exploratory factor analysis, chi-square, and multivariate analysis of variance. Materials and Methods:The justified death attitude scale included 59 items; other than the first 4 warm-up questions, each item included a scenario in which a decision should be made by the subject on life of the personage. Scenarios are related to rape, adultery, murder, drug trafficking, and active and passive euthanasia. The aforementioned scenarios and items are developed based on social interviews. Results: The justified death attitude scale showed an acceptable reliability and included eight factors that could explain 80.56 variance of the scale. A comparison with warm-up items and main items indicated that poll did not assess euthanasia attitude (P > 0 .05), but it could assess death penalty attitude (P < 0.05). Conclusions:The justified death attitude scale has acceptable validity and reliability in emotional attitude assessment of capital punishment and euthanasia.

How Gender, Majors, Religion and Mental Health Affect the Justified Death Attitude?

“…Characteristics of the JDAS are provided in detail elsewhere and the scale has been shown to have acceptable reliability and validity (1).…”

“…Then, subject should decide about the kind of penalty that s/he thinks is appropriate for the perpetrator (painful execution, nonpainful execution, long-term prison, short-term prison, freedom). To quantify the ratings, each item gets a score in a decreasing order from painful execution (5) to freedom (1). Each subscale scenario is rewritten for different situations to see if the perpetrator's characteristics like nationality (the same as or different from subject), race (the same as or different from subject), age (under or over 18), and religion (the same as or different from subject) would have an effect on the type of the decision that subject makes.…”

“…The newly developed justified death attitude scale (JDAS) measures individuals' attitude toward death penalty and euthanasia. This scale includes a number of scenarios in which the subject should comment about the appropriate sentence of a criminal (rapist, murderer, drug trafficker, or adulterer) or about appropriateness of euthanasia (active or passive) (1). One possible strength of JDAS is assessment of attitude using scenarios with real life situations.…”