Effect of Teaching the Components of Spiritual Intelligence on Death Anxiety in the Elderly

Abstract

ObjectivesThis study aimed at studying the effect of teaching spiritual intelligence principles on death anxiety among senior citizens living in retirement homes of Sanandaj City. Methods & Materials This study was a practical and quasi-experimental research performed by pre-and posttesting the control and experimental groups. The statistical population comprised all elderly residents of retirement homes in Sanandaj City. Twenty subjects were selected by convenient sampling from among the individuals who were willing to participate in the study and who received a high score in the death anxiety scale. They were then equally divided into two groups (10 subjects per group). The fear of death scale devised by Collet-Lester (1969) was used for pre-testing the subjects. The members of the experimental group received Spiritual Intelligence-based intervention in eight 90-minute sessions. The control group received no such intervention during this period. After the intervention, all the subjects were post-tested. The collected data were analyzed by the one-way and multi-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the SPSS-22 software. Results The mean and standard deviation of the age of the experimental group was 62.5±5.68 years and control group was 63.1±4.33 years. The results of covariance analysis showed a significant difference in post-test between the experimental group (120.9±4.81) and the control group (131.3±8.65) (P≤0.01). So, the results indicate that educating the subjects about spiritual intelligence components reduced their death anxiety (P≤0.01). The intervention also reduced the death of others and dying of others dimensions in the subjects (P≤0.01), but no significant impact was observed for the death of self and dying of self dimensions. Conclusion According to the findings, teaching spiritual intelligence principles reduces death anxiety. Therefore, it is recommended that more attention should be paid to teaching spiritual aspects in retirement centers. . Therefore, it is necessary to identify the factors responsible for reducing death anxiety. Given this background, this study aimed to investigate the effect of teaching the components of spiritual intelligence on the amount of death anxiety in the elderly living in Sanandaj's nursing homes. To achieve this goal, two questions were considered and examined: 1) A B S T R A C T 111Is the training of spiritual intelligence components effective in reducing death anxiety?; and 2) Does learning the components of spiritual intelligence reduce the dimensions of death anxiety (death of yourself, seeing you are dying, death of your neighbors, seeing dying relatives)? Methods and MaterialsThis study is applied research in terms of purpose, and it is semi-pilot with pre-test-post-test and control group in terms of implementation method. The statistical population of the research was all people living in nursing homes in Sanandaj in the first half of 2016. The sample selection process was as follows. After obtaining the necessary legal permissions, 100 Death Anxiety In...

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