Comment on large gender difference on death anxiety in Arab countries

In the recent interesting and excellent article by Abdel-Khalek (2) the large mean difference between Death Anxiety Scale (6) for males and females in Lebanon was noted. I have also noted such large differences in other studies with subjects in Arab countries (1, 3, 4). These studies and that of Abdel-Khalek (2) provide a total of 12 gender differences in four different countries--Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Libya. Although these large gender differences would be notable in comparison to those of most studies in the United States or other English-speaking countries, the comparison was made with the differences provided by the two studies that presented norms and norm-like information (5, 8). These two studies contain 12 pairs of means for both sexes. Eight of the 12 Arab difference means were higher than the highest American difference mean (chi 2 = 12.00, p less than .01). The reason(s) for the larger gender differences on death anxiety are not known, but it appears reasonable to suggest that in countries in which there are large sex-role differences that likely include bravery, men would be more expected to report lower death anxiety than women. Cross-cultural and demographic research with the recently developed Death Depression Scale (7) would likely yield interesting findings.