Abstract
The purpose of this study was to investigate the qualitative and quantitative differences in children and adolescents¡¦ death concept development, and to analyze the relationships of children and adolescents¡¦ death concept development with background variables (such as gender, age, religious belief, heath status, etc.)
The subjects were drawn from the primary school children and junior high school adolescents of the Affiliated Senior High School of National Kaohsiung Normal University. Data were drawing, questionnaire, and interview. 239 students (age 8-16) were asked to draw a picture when they heard the word death, 204 students (age 10-16) were administered by Fill-in-Sentence Questionnaire of Death, and 24 students (age 8-16) were interviewed individually. The total subject number was 239.
The drawings were analyzed following Marton¡¦s (1988) phenomenographic method and assigned to the modified classification scheme of death concept system developed by Tamm & Granqvist (1995), consisting 3 superordinate and 12 subordinate qualitative categories. With respect to Fill-in sentence questionnaire and interview data, they were analyzed according to content analysis method, with Fill-in sentence questionnaire using the categorization proposed by Neimeyer(1983) and Holcomb & Neimeyer (1993) as a template.
Data analysis included qualitative and quantitative analysis. Qualitative analysis selectively portrayed drawing representative of each superordinate/subordinate death concept and presented result from the interview with children. Quantitative analysis included descriptive statistics ,£q2 test and post comparison of£q2 test.
Analytically, the following were the results obtained from this study:
1.The internal causes and external causes of death were found with about equal frequency in both children and adolescents, with children above 2nd grade and adolescents all understanding the universality of death.
2.Children and adolescents expressing that dead bodies were not existential had approximately equal frequency (above 55%), but the majority of young children believed the existence of soul.
3.The majority of children and adolescents who actually faced real death usually expresses sadness and loss; it was natural response that death related things companied with negative emotion.
4.The majority of the 2nd to 6th children believed existence of world after death. However, many adolescents demonstrated more imagination about the world after death, although they didn¡¦t believe in the existence after death.
5. Many adolescents reported thoughts about nature of death and evaluation of death. Alternatively, children didn¡¦t report thoughts about nature of death, but they reported much negative evaluation of death.
6.There were significant differences in the death concept development with different grades and families communicating death. However, there were less significant differences in the death concept development with gender, religion, and death experience.
7.Only half children and adolescents reported that their parents ever talked about death with them, but parents were the targets that children wanted to talk to about death, while young adolescents has tendency to resort to their peers.
8.Children and adolescents reported the deepest impression of death concept was when family members died, while impressions of death from the mass communication media regarding violent death came in second.
According to the results of this study, recommendations regarding death education for parents, teachers, and institutions are laid out, and some suggestions for future research are also provided.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0818100-104429 |
| Date | 18 August 2000 |
| Creators | Chen, Shih-Fen |
| Contributors | Sue-May Chang, Suh-Shing Chung, Shu-Ching Yang, Li-Tsu Chen |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0818100-104429 |
| Rights | off_campus_withheld, Copyright information available at source archive |
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