Death Attitudes, Gender and Death Experience: The Nigerian Evidence

Abstract

Death education has just found its way into the Health Education and curriculum of Nigerian universities and so requires some baseline empirical data on students' death attitudes. The sample consisted of 311 students selected from six Nigerian universities that offered Health Education. Three research questions answered with statistical means and two null-hypotheses tested with two-tailed t-test and ANOVA guided the study. The Hoelter multidimensional fear of Death Scale (MFODS) and Templer's Death Anxiety Scale (DAS) were instruments for determining students' death fear and anxiety respectively with gender and death experience as the independent variables. Results showed that the students' generally had negative death attitudes with females showing greater non-significant negative death attitudes than males. Death experience made no difference as a variable. The implications of these findings particularly for health education were proffered.