Experimental factors in death anxiety

Anxiety about death was explored in relation to amount of clinical experience with death, manifest anxiety, locus of control and comfort with religious position. Subjects (Ss) were 34 pre-nursing students from the University of Houston, 44 junior year nursing students from Texas Women's University, and 61 senior year nursing students from Texas Women's University. These Ss were grouped into four groups which were differentiated on two dimensionsi total amount of clinical experience and amount of clinical experience with death. One of the groups had had much clinical experience with death (senior year nursing students with high clinical death experience). The other three groups served as controls for either effect of clinical experience (pre-nursing students), level of training in nursing school (junior year students) or amount of death experience (senior year nursing students with little clinical death experience). Within groups, Ss were also differentiated as to whether their scores on manifest anxiety, locus of control and religious comfort measures fell into a high, medium or low category. It was hypothesized that a high amount of clinical experience in dealing with death would result in lower death anxiety and concern about death. The assumption underlying this was that people over a period of time of dealing with death become desensitized to the anxiety involved in observing the deaths of others. Thus, the expectation was that Ss in the senior high death experience group would have lower death anxiety and death concern scores than Ss in other groups and that this would be true regardless of where their scores fell on the manifest anxiety, locus of control or comfort with religious position dimensions. Findings in the research literature indicated that these latter three variables influenced level of death anxiety. The dependent measures were Ss' scores on the Death Anxiety Scale (Templer, 1970) and the Death Concern Scale (Dickstein, 1972). Analyses of the data did not show group membership (amount of clinical experience with death) to have a significant effect on either death anxiety or death concern scores. The effect of level of manifest anxiety on both death measures was significant at the .01 level. The effects of degree of comfort with religious position on both death measures was significant at the .05 level. Therefore, the expectation that amount of clinical experience with death would be a more important determinant of death anxiety and death concern than certain intrapersonal variables was not supported by the data. In the case of two such variables, manifest anxiety and comfort with religious position, the opposite was found to be the case. The third variable, locus of control, was not found to have any significant effect on either death measure. It was suggested that problems in the way in which amount of clinical experience with death was operationalized and problems with the validity of the measuring instruments may have been involved in the failure of the hypotheses to be supported by the data. In particular, the measures used did not take into account the specific aspects of death such as who was dying and under what circumstances, but tended to treat death as a global, abstract entity. The way in which desensitization to death was conceptualized may not have been sufficiently complex; an alternative model of the process was offered. The relevance of styles of handling affect, in particular repression versus sensitization, was discussed. It was concluded that both individual differences and environmental factors are important to consider in doing death attitude research. N=1 studies were seen as a research strategy appropriate to this task in terms of the control over relevant variables they would provide. The significance of the present research for nursing education was discussed.