Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

The influence of attitudes about death on advance directive completion

Public Deposited

Downloadable Content

Download PDF
https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/wp988p102

Descriptions

Attribute NameValues
Creator
Abstract
  • Surveys of both patients and health care providers have indicated strong interest, up to 95%, in favor of advance directives, which are legal documents that express patients' healthcare treatment decisions. Despite the widespread support for advance directives, actual completion rates are very low, ranging from 4% to 20% for the general population. The purpose of this study is to explore how both demographics and attitudes about death predict advance directive completion in a community wide sample, using quantitative methods. Existing survey data from a sample of 259 persons in a Pacific Northwest community will be examined. The nine-page survey used in this study consisted of questions about demographics, advance care planning, spiritual beliefs, attitudes of, and experiences with death and dying, preferred medical practices, and pain management. Questions that dealt with attitudes about death used a modified version of Bugen's Coping with Death Scale. Validity and reliability were established for the modified scale. Logistic regression analyses found that increasing age was positively and significantly associated with advance directive completion, statistically controlling for gender, race, income, education, and coping with death. Results also showed that higher scores on the Coping with Death scale were positively and significantly associated with advance directive completion, statistically controlling for age gender, race, income, and education. Ability to cope with death gives insight to the discrepancy between the strong support for advance directives and the low completion rates.
License
Resource Type
Date Available
Date Issued
Degree Level
Degree Name
Degree Field
Degree Grantor
Commencement Year
Advisor
Committee Member
Academic Affiliation
Non-Academic Affiliation
Subject
Rights Statement
Publisher
Peer Reviewed
Language
Digitization Specifications
  • File scanned at 300 ppi (Monochrome, 8-bit Grayscale) using ScandAll PRO 1.8.1 on a Fi-6670 in PDF format. CVista PdfCompressor 4.0 was used for pdf compression and textual OCR.
Replaces

Relationships

Parents:

This work has no parents.

In Collection:

Items

Thumbnail Title Date Uploaded Visibility Actions
file details SrinivasanEricaG2005.pdf 2017-08-19 Public Download