The Uncertain Certainty: A Mixed Methods Exploration of Personal Meanings of Death and Preliminary Insights Into Their Relationship With Worldview

Abstract

The present mixed methods study investigated personal meanings of death, i.e., concepts, views, and expectations associated with one’s own death, and explored their relation to worldview. To this end, a sample of 202 young, German-speaking adults completed the Death Statements Test, a new qualitative assessment tool, as well as quantitative measures of religiosity, spirituality, atheism, and agnosticism. Qualitative data was transformed to enable quantitative analyses. Results indicated that the spectrum of personal meanings of death is generally broad and multifaceted. The most prevalent view on death was “death as source of motivation and meaning in life.” The frequencies of emotionally positive and negative death meanings were relatively balanced, while neutral statements dominated. Relationships between participants’ death meanings and worldview dimensions turned out to be small but existent. The Death Statements Test proved to be a valuable and economic assessment tool, eliciting rich qualitative material on personal meanings of death.