Hello everybody and thank you for your time! As you probably already know that this survey was not a part of a study and I have done no literature search beforehand. This is just a part of my personal curiosity. Before I go on to the results I must say a couple of things. First, I hate SurveyMonkey and up until the night I posted the survey I did not know that it did not give the results to me, it only showed the frequency for each answer. It is charging me (and quite a bit in my opinion) to give me the results so I am so sorry that the data of 150 participants are excluded from the analysis. But I did had the chance to read the responses to the last question, so we are good over there. From what I have read, I learned that I need to work on the questions a little bit more, on the explanations and the given choices. I choose to do it this way so that it could be a Likert scale and I could analyze the results easily but I’ll try to figure out a better way. Also I appreciate everyone who left a comment either to make a recommendation or to share their personal experiences. I really felt close to you guys, and if you look for someone to talk, you can contact me through here whenever you want, just state that you are coming from the Fear of Death survey.
Also for everyone out there with MDD or suicidal thoughts, I feel for you. Like I said you can contact me anytime if you need someone to talk, but also you can contact here too, they are angels: http://www.samaritans.org/ or here http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/
Now the results of the study. Due to SurveyMonkey who doesn’t give me my data, my sample size is 71. And together with the comments, I might treat this part two as another pilot study and maybe conduct a third one but on Google Docs this time.
This “study” investigated if there is any correlation between people’s willingness to learn their time of death (TOD) and their fear of death (FOD). My hypothesis was that TOD and FOD would be negatively correlated, that is the less a person is afraid of death the more they would be likely to want to learn their time of death.
Participants were recruited through a reddit post and this blog page (N = 221) due to the policy of SurveyMonkey the results of 150 participants were not available hence the analysis was carried out for 71 participants.
A Pearson Correlation test was carried out and the results were statistically significant and indicated that the less a person is afraid of death the more they are willing to learn their time of death r(69) = -.337, p < .004.
When the responses were controlled for belief in afterlife the results were still significant r(68) = -.334, p < .005. Which means irrespective of their belief in the afterlife TOD and FOD were still correlated as before.
What I’ve learned from this study is that I could reject the null hypothesis (which is no correlation between TOD and FOD) and if someone is less afraid of death then they are more willing to learn the time of their death.
The raw data of the study is this:Fear of Death and Willingness to Learn The Time of Death – WordPress Copy. I removed the responses to the last question even though the participants cannot be matched with their identity, I did not feel okay with posting them.
And don’t forget kids:
Correlation does not imply causation!
If you have any questions or comments please leave below. I have taken an introductory statistics course yet so I hope that I did not make a mistake in the analysis or the interpretation of the results.
And I wish you all happy lives and healthy brains!
My Brain Has Lots To Say 