고등학생의 죽음에 대한 태도에 관한 연구

High school students’ attitude toward death

This study is aimed at investigating the high school students’ perception and attitude toward death, suicide, and altruistic death; how much the education about death is asked of; the differences in accordance with their personal background(sex, religion, having parents or not); and at providing the data for the instruction and the consultation about death in school. The subjects of the study were 407 high school students in Kongju City. The investigation was conducted with the questionnaire mostly by Schneidman and partly by the researcher. All the data were processed by SPSS computer program. The results of this study are as follows: 1. Perception toward death 92.6% of the subjects replied that they have ever thought about their own death. 36.6% of the regarded death to be the end of life and 25.1% to be an eternal sleep. Their responses were different according to their religion : Christian students(41.0%) considers death as the beginning of the future life after death ; Catholic students(47.1%) as the eternal sleep ; and Buddhist(46.4%) and unreligious students(48.4%) as the end of life. 2. Attitude toward death 1) The attitude toward death appeared to be greatly influenced by the death of intimate persons(33.2%) and some influenced by religions(16.0%). Christian students answered that the attitude toward death was influenced much by their religious education(42.4%, P〈0.001). 2) 22.6% of the subjects replied that one would spend the remainder of his life to complete the unsolved plan if he had to face death sooner or later. 3) 71.7% of the subjects want it to be known to them if they suffer from incurable diseases. 3. Attitude toward suicide 1) 73.0% of the subjects have ever thought about suicide and 18.7% of the subjects replied that it is possible to attempt suicide later. The possibility that religious students will commit suicide is less than that of unreligeous students. 2) The cause of thinking of suicide is loneliness and frustration(33.1%), according for the highest. 3) 38.3% of the subjects replied that suicide must be prevented in all cases, and Christian students or Catholic students gave more responses to it than unreligious students(P〈0.01). 4. Attitude toward altruistic death. 1) 93.1% of the subjects answered that they have to do their best to restore helth from serious illness. 2) Most subjects(65.1%) answered that they can joyfully sacrifice themselves for their lovers, and girls gave more responses to it than boys(P〈0.01). 3) 44.0% respondents answered that they would willingly donate their own organs for transplantation after their death. 5. Need of education about death 85.1% respondents replied that they needed to receive an education about death, and girls gave more responses than boys to this(P〈0.001).