The Impermanence Awareness and Acceptance Scale

Objectives: This research offers an operationalization of the construct impermanence, a scale to measure it, and an exploration of its relationship to mental health. The 13-item Impermanence Awareness and Acceptance Scale (IMAAS) was created to measure two factors: (1) impermanence awareness, the cognizance that all phenomena are transient, and (2) impermanence acceptance, an attitude of openness towards the transient nature of all phenomena. Methods: Exploratory factor analysis (Study 1), confirmatory factor analysis (Study 2), and convergent and discriminant validity analyses (Study 3) were conducted. Participants were recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. The common latent factor method was used to identify potential common factors and response biases. Configural and metric invariance test was used to validate the factor structure. Results: Confirmatory factor analysis showed a good model fit of a 2-factor structure for the IMAAS into impermanence awareness and acceptance (GFI = 0.95, CFI = 0.97; TLI = 0.96; NFI = 0.94; RMSEA = 0.05, SRMR = 0.43). The IMAAS showed good convergent validity with similar constructs such as death acceptance and good discriminant validity with related but different constructs such as mindfulness. Impermanence awareness and acceptance were positively correlated to psychological well-being. Conclusions: The IMAAS is proposed as a valid tool to assess changes in impermanence awareness and acceptance. More studies are needed to validate the IMAAS across diverse cross-cultural samples and to explore its relationship to well-being.