The Contribution of Death-Related Experiences to Health Care Providers' Attitudes toward Dying Patients: I. Graduate and Undergraduate Nursing Students

Abstract

This is the first in a series of studies planned by the authors concerned with the contribution of different death-related experiences to health care providers' attitudes toward caring for dying patients. This study investigated the contributions of personal, professional, and educational experience to the aversive and attractive components of those attitudes among 420 undergraduate and graduate students at six university-based nursing schools. The results showed that aversiveness decreased, attractiveness increased, and overall attitude became more positive, as the number, extent, and specificity of a student's death-related experiences increased. However, the different types of experience differed in the degree to which they affected each component: aversiveness was most affected by professional experience, attractiveness by personal experience. Educational experience made a small but significant contribution to both. The psychological assumptions and the measurement model underlying the development of the questionnaire and the interpretation of the data are presented. The implications of these results for future professional education are discussed.