Study On The Tendency Of Death Attitude Of The Elderly In Shanghai And Its Influencing Factors

ObjectivesThe evaluation of human attitudes toward death have been quantitatively studied at home and abroad,but there is still a lack of standardized reliability and validity studies.This study summarizes previous literature,collects relevant mature scales related to death attitudes,and develops a national Death Attitude Scale for Chinese traditional culture.Two groups from Chinese college students and the elderly in Shanghai have selected to explore the death-relevant attitudes in Chinese people and tentatively investigate the influencing factors of the death-relevant attitudes.MethodsStudy 1: Translates and revises the Death Obsession Scale(DOS),and develops the Death Attitude Scale(DAS)suitable for the Chinese cultural background,with 154 cases of college students(females accounted for 66.9%)as the control group and 278 cases of elderly residents in Shanghai(females accounted for 60.1%)as the research group,analyzes the reliability and validity of the questionnaire and revises the questionnaire based on the results further.Study 2: 404 cases of college students(females accounted for 59.4%)as the control group and 278 cases of Shanghai elderly residents(females accounted for 60.1%)as research group were surveyed.Using the Death Obsession Scale,Death Attitude Scale,Eysenck Personality QuestionnaireRevised Short Scale,Self-Rating Anxiety Scale,Geriatric depression Scale-15,Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale and AD8 scale,to explore the attitudes of death of college students and elderly people in Shanghai,and preliminary analyze the impact of demographic variables on the scores of scales and the differences between scores in the two groups.ResultsStudy 1: In both populations,each item of the Death Obsession Scale and the Death Attitude Scale had strong discriminative power,test-retest reliability,and discriminant validity.Among the college students,the exploratory factor analysis of the Death Obsession Scale showed that one factor was extracted explaining 71.77% of the total variation;the exploratory factor analysis of the Death Attitude Scale showed that 5 factors was extracted,cumulatively explaining 74.58% of the total variation.In the elderly population in Shanghai,the exploratory factor analysis of the Death Obsession Scale showed that two factors were extracted,cumulatively explaining the 74.22% of total variation;the exploratory factor analysis of the Death Attitude Scale showed that 4 factors were extracted,cumulatively explaining 71.15% of the total variation.Study 2: Among the college students,there was no significant statistical difference in the DOS and DAS scores between the subjects with the different demographic variables such as gender,household registration location,and whether they were only children.However,the religious beliefs of the subjects had significant influence on the scores of the scales,those subjects with religious beliefs got significantly higher than the subjects with no religious beliefs.Moreover,there is a significant but weak correlation between age of subjects and the scale scores.Among the elderly in Shanghai,there was a statistically significant positive correlations between death obsession,death attitudes and anxiety,depression,obsession,neuroticism of elderly in Shanghai,but there is no statistically significant correlations between death obsession,death attitudes and psychoticism,introversion-extroversion,lying.In the elderly population,the death obsession and death-relevant attitudes of women are significantly higher than that of men,and those with lower education levels have higher death obsession scores and shows more negative death attitude.It is worth mentioning that the scores of the elderly on the Death Obsession Scale and Death Attitude Scale are significantly lower than those of college students.ConclusionsDOS and DAS have good reliability and validity in college students and the elderly,and can be further tested in scientific research and clinical practice.