Development and Psychometric Properties of the Justified Death Attitude Scale

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 performedon571 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 inwhicha decision should bemadeby the subjectonlife 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.