The Dissociative Experiences Scale-ii: Descriptive Statistics, Factor Analysis, and Frequency of Experiences*

Psychometric aspects of the Dissociative Experiences Scale-II were studied with 308 American community college students. The overall DES mean was 21.70. Item-corrected correlations ranged from .30 to .62. The scale’s Cronbach Alpha was .92. There were no significant correlations between DES scores and sex or religiosity. Age was negatively and significantly correlated to DES scores (r = –.24). A factor analysis showed only a single factor. Descriptive statistics of the DES-T were also presented. We obtained a mean of 13.81 and a Cronbach Alpha of .75. The DES-T was significantly correlated to the rest of the scale (r = .79), and to the age of the participants (r = –.22). The findings show that the DES II has good inner consistency. In recent years many studies have been published in which the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES [1]) has been used to measure the frequency of dissociative experiences (for reviews see [2, 3]). This scale has been shown to be both valid and reliable in research designed to test its psychometric properties [4-8]. However, the scoring of the scale is slow and cumbersome because responses must be measured with a ruler along a 100 cm. response continuum. This is especially so *This article was written while the authors enjoyed research grants from the Institut f r Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene. 145 2002, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. when administering the scale to large samples. Consequently, an easier-to-score version, the DES II, was developed (for a copy of the scale, see Carlson and Putnam’s article [2]). This revised scale uses a sequence of numbers ranging from 0 to 100. Arranged as a continuum in increments of 10, the revised scale allows for a quicker and more efficient scoring procedure. Initial research has shown that the scores of the DES II are similar to those obtained on the original scale [9-11]. In this study, originally designed to relate dissociative experiences to other such experiences such as dreams and out-of-body experiences [12, 13], we present data that further explores the psychometric properties of the DES II.