Life Meaning and Death Attitude among Pediatric Nurses

Background: Meaning of life is defined as the degree to which people understand the importance of their lives and realize that they have a purpose, a mission or a primary goal in their lives. Meaning in this sense enables people to interpret and organize their experience, achieve a sense of their own worth and place, identify the things that matter to them, and effectively cope with uncertainty and ephemerality of life.

Objective: To investigate whether life meaning is related to death attitude among pediatric nurses.

Methods: One hundred and seventy nurses, working in pediatric hospital departments completed (a) a sociodemographic questionnaire, (b) DAP-R (Death Attitude Profile – Revised) of Wong, Reker & Gesser (1994), (c) Meaning in Life Questionnaire [MLQ] of Steger, Frazier & Oishi (2006).

Results: The 68.6% of our participants reported that the death of a child affects them very much, while 44.7% didn’t feel well prepared to manage death issues. Consequently, it isn’t surprising that a high percentage (49.4%) referred they avoided the thought of death at all costs. In addition, nurses, who avoided thoughts and discussions about death to a greater extent, were more likely to seek meaning in their lives. 57.4% of the sample believed that death should be treated as a normal, indisputable and inevitable fact, while 62.9% reported that they neither feared nor welcomed death. Nurses, who were more inclined to accept death as something natural, without fear but also without anticipation, sought meaning in their lives to a greater extent and vice versa. Nurses, who were married had found a greater meaning in their lives.

Conclusion: As meaning in life refers to people`s beliefs that their lives are significant and that they transcend the ephemeral present, it becomes apparent that the concepts of life meaning and death attitudes are extremely involved.