Death Anxiety and Associated Demographic Correlates in a Sample of University Students

Abstract

Demographic correlates of death anxiety (ageing anxiety, religiosity, gender and academic study year) were quantitatively examined among students in a Nigerian university. A total of 250 undergraduate students (females = 49.2%, mean age = 21.95, SD = 3.51) were conveniently surveyed using a standardized questionnaire. The questionnaire measured death anxiety, ageing anxiety, religiosity, gender and academic study year. Data were analyzed with Pearson Correlation, One-Way ANOVA and independent samples t-test. Results showed that ageing anxiety positively associated with death anxiety. Results also revealed that death anxiety was not significantly influenced by religiosity, gender and academic study year. The study recommends further research on aspects of ageing anxiety that may be linked to the fear of death to aid the design of effective interventions to reduce levels of death anxiety among university students. 1Address for correspondence: Chibuzor Uchenna Onuoha INTRODUCTION Awareness of life’s finite existence can significantly impact on our thoughts, feelings, and behaviour, so that the thought of dying tend to arouse high levels of anxiety in some people (Niemiec and Schulenberg 2011). However, being a younger person has been shown to be strongly associated with higher levels of deathrelated fear (Chopik 2017; Russac et al. 2007). Death anxiety describes the psychological condition associated with heightened fear, threat, unease and discomfort with death and dying (McKenzie and Brown 2017). It is an existential issue experienced by individuals across the various demographic groupings (Sinoff 2017). Research that investigated why younger people report higher levels of death anxiety compared to other population cohorts have identified personal attributes including exposure to dying patients (Edo-Gual et al. 2014; Ek et al. 2014), religiosity (Chow 2017; Jong and Halberstadt 2016), gender (Asari and Lankarani 2016; Dadfar et al. 2018) and age (Krause et al. 2018) as correlates. It is noteworthy that most of these studies were conducted in countries where the citizens already enjoy higher life expectancy. But research is needed to investigate the extent to which ageing anxiety, religiosity, gender and academic study year are related to death anxiety among university students in countries like Nigeria with a low life expectancy relative to the global average.